Now, Oracle May Finally Rest With the Siebel deal

With the Siebel deal, Larry Ellison says his buying spree may be ending. Now it's time to get all his newly acquired software to work together
After six acquisitions worth more than $17 billion in nine months, Oracle's (ORCL ) appetite for buying rivals may finally be sated. The software giant surprised few when it announced on Sept. 12 that it would purchase troubled Siebel Systems (SEBL ) for $5.85 billion. The deal -- rumored widely since Siebel stumbled in the first quarter and ousted Chief Executive Mike Lawrie after less than a year on the job -- steps up Oracle's challenge to Europe's SAP (SAP ) in the battle to dominate applications software.

Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison triggered a wave of software consolidation with an 18-month battle for PeopleSoft that closed last year. For the first time, he's now signaling that his buying spree may at last be winding down. "I don't think you'll see another major acquisition any time soon," he said on the conference call announcing the Siebel deal.

PLANTING FLAGS. The acquisition certainly fills a gap in Oracle's product lineup. Almost 80% of Ellison & Co.'s revenue still comes from its database business, despite the company's long-standing attempt to pose a serious threat to SAP in business applications, like those used to manage companies' accounting, sales staffs, and human-resources departments. Oracle software for managing companies' financial departments was strong, but other applications paled in comparison to smaller companies like PeopleSoft and Siebel, not to mention SAP.

That has all changed in the last nine months. Thanks to the PeopleSoft merger, application revenues leapt 52%, to $350 million, for the fiscal year that ended May 31. And smaller acquisitions of Retek, ProfitLogic, and iFlex plant important flags in industries like retail and banking -- two areas where neither SAP nor Oracle are strong. With Seibel, Oracle says it will rank first in software that runs customer relations.

And Oracle can make the products work together well with its own databases and application servers. In theory, that could save companies tens of millions of dollars now paid to pricey consultants to handle the integration tasks. And in a maturing market like software, it means more money that can be spent on the software itself, says Peter Coleman, analyst at ThinkEquity Partners. "The only way to increase growth is to free up some of that 90 cents on the dollar that's going to integration," he says.

NOW A NONSTARTER. SAP likely won't miss a beat playing on customers' concerns that Oracle will stumble as it tries to integrate the various new businesses it's acquiring -- or that Oracle won't support older versions of its software. "Oracle's strategy is buying customers. Ours is serving customers," says SAP spokesman Tony Roddam.

In recent years, SAP was Siebel's biggest threat, surpassing Siebel as the top seller of new customer-relationship-management licenses by some estimates. And SAP is already deep into a project that would let Siebel users stick with their software but tie it easily into an SAP universe -- and the software should be ready years before Oracle can match it.

Even though customers and analysts agree that Siebel's software has always been technologically the best on the market, customers increasingly wanted to buy from one big software vendor. SAP was only too happy to beat the "best-of-breed-is-dead" drum quarter-after-quarter to steal big deals -- and some of the most talented salespeople and executives -- from Siebel.

Yet now that Siebel is part of Oracle, that argument is a nonstarter. And unless Oracle stumbles badly, SAP will have a hard time nabbing a sizable hunk of the 4,000 corporate customers Oracle has just acquired, analysts say. For one thing, the software at issue runs the core business functions of companies around the world from human resources and accounting to managing customer relationships. It's hard, complex stuff -- and expensive to integrate once, let alone ripping it out and starting over.

WHEN AND AT WHAT PRICE? "There's no compelling reason to move from Siebel, when arguably this merger will mean it will integrate better with Oracle's" other software, says Rebecca Wettemann, vice-president for research at Nucleus Research. "And existing Oracle customers are going to get much better CRM software out of this."

That's why analysts say Oracle and Siebel needed each other badly, and why few were surprised about the deal. For months, industry watchers have been confident it would happen -- the only variables being when and at what price. Siebel's market reality had changed. It could no longer close big deals, and its costs were too high for it to remain profitable without major sales.

Also, a nasty shareholder revolt was brewing with activist hedge funds buying bigger stakes and warning about a proxy battle at next year's annual meeting if Siebel didn't sell. And, while IBM (IBM ) and Microsoft (MSFT ) had been mentioned as potential suitors, Oracle was really the only one making an offer, analysts say.

"MARGIN GAME." For Oracle, growth in its core database software business is slowing, and it was too late to the applications game to build competing products organically, the way SAP did. Its only option was buying big installed customer bases and winning more business when companies are ready to upgrade. "This is a margin game," says ThinkEquity's Coleman. "The more software Oracle can sell with fewer salespeople, fewer support people, and less R&D, and a larger installed base, the better."

Now the hard part begins for Oracle. It will need to allay customers' concerns -- whether real or drummed up by SAP -- that it has bought too many companies too quickly of late. Oracle also embarks on the daunting task of melding the various strands of software into attractive and workable packages for customers. This may have been Oracle's last big move, but the real battle for businesses' IT dollars is just beginning.

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Marriage of former foes
>By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
>Published: September 12 2005 20:23 | Last updated: September 12 2005 20:23
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For a merger that was all about managing relationships, Larry Ellison and Tom Siebel were putting their best face on getting along on Monday.

The chief executives of Oracle and Siebel have been savage competitors over the years. Industry observers recounted on Monday how Tom Siebel once turned up with cuts and bruises on his face and joked that he had run into Larry Ellison in a bar.

Then there was the time Larry Ellison summoned his rival to his office and ripped up in front of him a contract scheduled to be signed by the two companies, the Siebel Observer newsletter recalled.

Many of Siebel’s employees including its founder are former Oracle workers and, although a major rationalisation of its corporate centre is certain, most should be returning to the fold.


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>Oracle snaps up rival Siebel in $5.85bn deal
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Oracle agreed to buy Siebel Systems for $5.85bn in cash and stock, sealing its second large acquisition in less than a year. The purchase will establish Oracle as the world's largest provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software.Go there
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There had been a growing inevitability about the reunification.
“This discussion has been going on between Siebel and Oracle for years,” said Mr Siebel. “Larry and I know each other very well. We started working together 23 years ago and so this is kind of a natural business combination that really is a customer-driven event.”

“Thanks to Tom Siebel for putting this deal together . . .  I hope Tom is going to be working with us . . . for some number of years,” said Mr Ellison in a rare show of bonhomie.

The timing of the deal, according to Oracle, had been set by its need to digest its acquisition of PeopleSoft – a $10.5bn deal finalised this year. But it has also picked off Siebel at a low point for the company – it lost its number one spot in business applications to larger German rival SAP last year and has seen its position eroded by a young upstart, Salesforce.com, in serving applications on-demand over the internet.

“The same thing that happened to PeopleSoft will happen to Siebel, it will die,” predicted Marc Benioff, Salesforce chief executive, yesterday. “Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will be the first to be buried.”

But Paul Hamerman, Forrester Research analyst, said the ability to earn regular payments for hosting customers’ software so they could run it remotely over the internet was a key attraction for Oracle.

“Oracle needs an on-demand offering. It has had on-demand services but not really an on-demand application offering.

“We are seeing a lot of acceptance of the subscription model, particularly in the mid-market,” he said.

Oracle might have completed its major acquisitions in CRM (customer relationship management) to shore up its position against SAP and Microsoft, but it could still be looking for smaller deals in certain industries.

“They want to go deeper into service-oriented industries, where they could establish leadership over SAP,” said Mr Hamerman, citing the banking, retail and telecoms sectors.

While Mr Ellison may feel he has done enough dealing to strengthen business applications, he might want to expand into infrastructure software, application servers and business intelligence in the future, where SAP is still dominant.

“Oracle risks trying to integrate too many pieces at once,” said Octavio Marenzi of research company Celent.

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Two Words from Bill Gates: Computer Science

Two Words from Bill Gates: Computer Science
Microsoft founder also tells college students outsourcing jobs is not a 'zero-sum game.'

Joris Evers, IDG News Service

It wasn't "Plastics" as Dustin Hoffman was advised in the movie The Graduate, but computers that Bill Gates told a college audience would be the ticket to a good career in the near future. "You can't go wrong in computer science," the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect advised students at the University of California at Berkeley during a Friday appearance.

Some UC-Berkeley students, however, were unhappy with the way Gates responded to questions about increasing competition for jobs from China and India. "It is a little scary for me to see people thinking of this as a zero-sum game. It is not like a war where you have one winner and one loser," Gates told the students during his appearance. "China and India are the big change engines for the years ahead, and as we embrace that and understand our new role in that, that's the path forward."
Outsourcing Concerns

But while Gates' regular university visits are meant to evangelize the field of computer science, several students felt Gates did not address their concerns about outsourcing and the growing number of engineers in lower-wage countries like China and India.

"Gates sort of glossed that over. As chairman of a corporation, does he care where he hires his employees?" wondered Anatoly Smolkin, an electrical engineering and computer science student at the university. Jobs will move overseas and salaries for computer scientists and engineers will fall as a result of competition with countries such as India and China, he said.

Another student, Ali El-Annan, said Gates' comments made him a bit anxious. "I was sort of surprised. They can't really create jobs there while leaving jobs here," he said of outsourcing. "There is a lot of concern about that among students."

The United States will have to compete with China and India on the merits and not through protectionism, Gates said. Universities play a major role in that competition and funding for universities will need to be protected, he added. "I believe that the university system is the number one thing that has allowed us to be at the center of innovation," he said.
Double Major

Gates was interviewed at Berkeley by Richard Newton, dean of the university's College of Engineering. Talking about computer science, Gates said there is plenty of work that still needs to be done. He also pitched a double major of computer science and biology as a ticket for a great future career.

"If we look at the PC today, it is certainly a glass half-full in terms of the ease of use," Gates said. Advances in storing data and in user interfaces, such as unified storage and speech, will make PCs better in the future. Also, artificial intelligence and graphics are major areas of innovation, Gates said.

Looking ahead, Gates sees biology as a "sister science" to computer science. "I think a lot of the breakthroughs will be made by people who were trained in biology and computer science," he said.

Last February, Gates went on a week-long tour to visit five top universities in the U.S. At Berkeley, he also faced some tough questions from students about the effect of the PC industry on the environment and on Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior.

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How is the MIS Major Different from the Computer Science Major?

The MIS Major

The confusion over degree such as "techno-MBA" has eased up a bit, but not entirely. The computer science on the other hand has much more vintage and people understand it well. This article compares and contrasts the MIS major and the computer science major.

What is the Big Difference?
At the heart of the difference between an MIS major and a computer science major is the fact that an MIS major is a student of business and a computer science major is a student of science / technology.

Are the Courses that MIS Majors and Computer Science Majors take identical?
There are similarities, but MIS majors take a lot of business courses. That makes the curricula quite different.

Is Every Good Candidate for Computer Science Also a Good Candidate for MIS?
Unlikely! Though they take a lot of similar courses, the people / group / business orientation of MIS majors is quite different from the tech / algorithm / logic orientation of computer science majors. However, both majors need to be fluent with technology and have strong analytical skills.

Who Earns More?
Both earn pretty well. Among business majors, MIS majors historically have one of the best starting salaries. But, computer science majors tend to earn even more.

Do MIS Majors and Computer Science Majors Compete for the Same Jobs?
They might compete for the same job occasionally. But, classically, MIS majors apply for more "people-oriented" jobs, such as consulting, retailing, communication, and the like. Computer science majors, classically, apply for more technical jobs, such as programming, product development, and the like.

Do MIS Majors and Computer Science Majors Apply for Jobs to the Same Companies?
There is a significant overlap in the companies that both apply to. But, classically, more computer science majors apply to "tech-companies" -- both in the fields of software and hardware.

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Bill Gates Is A Good Guy

By Larry Lange

Updated Friday, March 14, 2003
At the risk of slapping a bulls-eye on my forehead, I've got something to say to everyone who's mad as hell that Bill Gates is rich.

Get off his back!

I'm not talking the legions of Microsoft bashers who complain about its software, that Windows is a rip-off of Apple's Lisa, that security is nearly nonexistent, that IE bullied Netscape out of the running, that licensing agreements are unfair, and on and on.

What I'm talking about here is the complete and utter resentment over Bill Gates' financial wealth. A cursory Google search finds an unlimited amount of sites dedicated to trashing Gates on a personal level, attacks that go deep. "Kill Bill! Inflict pies, eggs and scissors upon Bill's head! And "Punch Bill Gates! Slap him around!" Even "Assassinate Bill Gates!"

I think it's time to give the man his due. Why? One word: Philanthropy.

Billions And Billions ...
Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have been giving away huge chunks of their fabulous wealth to some of the world's most needy cases, and they've been doing so for years. They endowed a philanthropic foundation with more than $24 billion, and to date The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed more than $5 billion to related causes:



More than $3.1 billion to global health organizations
More than $1.4 billion to improve educational opportunities, which includes an initiative to bring computers, Internet access, and training to public libraries in low-income communities in the U.S.
More than $380 million to other special projects and annual giving campaigns
More than $260 million to community projects in the Pacific Northwest.

Check out some of the specifics from just the past few months:

At the World Economic Forum meeting in January, Gates wrote a check for $200 million to determine the leading causes of death in developing countries, and to entice scientists to address them. This follows Gates' commitment of three years ago at the Forum, when he ponied up $750 million to worldwide vaccine programs. So far, that has resulted in the vaccinations of more than 10 million children, preventing more than 100,000 premature deaths.

Also in January, Gates gave $1.5 million to the International Women's Media Foundation Announces Campaign, in order to train African women journalists to become better reporters and educators on healthcare issues like HIV and AIDS—diseases that could literary kill the entire population of the continent.

And in February, Gates provided $31 million to create a nationwide network of 168 alternative schools for 36,000 kids who couldn't make it in traditional high schools, particularly African-American and Hispanic students.

I could go on here, but you're probably dying to know: Why does he do it? What's the hidden agenda? To avoid taxes? To improve his image in light of the government's high-profile antitrust suit?

The Giving Type
It's very simple. Gates' philanthropy is consistent with what he's been saying for years: That he will give away most of his fortune before he dies, so that his children aren't burdened with tremendous wealth, will be responsible for themselves, and will learn to be entrepreneurs of their own.

But the grants aren't given willy-nilly. Look at the details and it's clear that Gates is approaching crises with solid research and cold, hard thought; figuring out exactly how and where to spend the money—and then cutting the checks. Which is why he's getting scientists and the media involved in the AIDS crisis and giving educators real schools in which to work. And the checks don't go the usual suspects like the United Way; rather, Gates devises and underwrites pro-active strategies for professionals to get involved with, so they can give responsibly of themselves.

So what, you say? Maybe Gates is just looking to pass the "tombstone test," that he wants to be remembered not just for technology but as a Samaritan who put his money where his mouth was? Well, maybe so. But who among us doesn't want that?

All right, so maybe he's giving away his money to expand Microsoft's markets? Doubtful. Sure, Microsoft wants to grab coveted engineering talent from other countries, just as all the leading tech firms do. But who else is personally traveling to India to commit $100 million to fight HIV and AIDS there? Because that's just what he did last November—and he took a lot of guff for it too. For instance, one Indian Web poster, Subhomoy Mukherjee, wrote: "I strongly feel there is some sort of hidden interest lying behind this act. Maybe for building up other development centre or marketing for Windows."

C'mon—I've been to India, and you don't face the harrowing poverty there without literally dropping to your knees in anguish. I don't care how cold-hearted he's perceived to be, or how rich he is, Gates had to have been moved.

Know what I think? I think Gates-bashers are just jealous. Bottom line. They're angry he's still the richest person on the planet, and they were probably even happy that his worth fell about $10 billion last year because of the economy. I can hear them now: "Aw, too bad for Billy-boy, out $10 billion, what a shame."

But you can't bash Gates when he writes: "Our grant-making is grounded in the belief that the death of a child in Africa is no less tragic than the death of a child in America, and the understanding that those of us who were born in rich countries have a fundamental responsibility to help those who weren't." You can't fight him when he says: "This new century brings with it exciting advances in health and learning. We all share the responsibility of ensuring that these opportunities are not out of reach for the people who need them the most."

You know, he might just be doing it because he actually cares. At one point during the World Economic Forum in January, U.S. health secretary Tommy Thompson turned to Bill Gates and said matter-of-factly: "What a wonderful human being you are."

Sure, that's a little gushy, but it sounds about right to me.

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Top 10 New Manager Mistakes

Guide Picks - From F. John Reh,Your Guide to Management. Managing can be a little daunting at first. A recent poll found almost 50% of managers received NO training before starting the job. Here is a list of the most common mistakes new managers make so you can avoid making them too.

1) Think you know everything.

If you were just promoted to Production Manager, you may feel you know everything about production. Even if that were true, and it isn't, you sure don't know everything about the most important part of your new job, managing people. Listen to the people around you. Ask for their input when appropriate. Keep an open mind.

2) Show everyone who's in charge.

Trust me, everyone in your group knows who the new manager is. You don't have to make a big show about being "the boss". You do, however, have to demonstrate that, as the boss, you are making a positive difference.

3) Change everything.

Don't re-invent the wheel. Just because the way something is done isn't the way you would do it, it isn't necessarily wrong. Learn the difference between "different" and "wrong".

4) Be afraid to do anything.

Maybe you didn't ask for the promotion. Maybe you are not sure you can do the job. Don't let that keep you from doing the job the best you can. Upper management wouldn't have put you into the job if they didn't have confidence that you could handle it.

5) Don't take time to get to know your people.

Maybe you worked alongside these people for years. That doesn't mean you know them. Learn what makes them excited, how to motivate them, what they fear or worry about. Get to know them as individuals, because that's the only way you can effectively manage them. Your people are what will make or break you in your quest to be a good manager. Give them your attention and time.

6) Don't waste time with your boss.

Since he/she just promoted you, surely he/she understands how busy you are and won't need any of your time, right? Wrong. Your job, just like it was before you became a manager, is to help your boss. Make sure to budget time to meet with him/her to both give information and to receive guidance and training.

7) Don't worry about problems or problem employees.

You can no longer avoid problems or hope they will work themselves out. When something comes up, it is your job to figure out the best solution and get it done. That doesn't mean you can't ask for other's input or assistance, but it does mean you are the person who has to see it gets taken care of.

8) Don't let yourself be human.

Just because you are the boss doesn't mean you can be human, that you can't laugh, or show emotion, or make an occassional mistake.

9) Don't protect your people.

The people in your group will be under pressure from every direction. Other departments may want to blame you for failed interfaces. Your boss may want to dump all the unpleasant jobs on your department. HR may decide the job classifications in your area are overpaid. It's your job to stand up for your people and make sure they are treated as fairly as possible. They will return the loyalty.

10) Avoid responsibility for anything.

Like it or not, as the manager you are responsible for everything that happens in your group, whether you did it, or knew about it, or not. Anything anyone in your group does, or doesn't do, reflects on you. You have to build the communications so there are no surprises, but also be prepared to shoulder the responsibility. It goes hand-in-hand with the authority.

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How an organization defines and measures progress toward its goals

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) - From F. John Reh,Your Guide to Management.

How an organization defines and measures progress toward its goals

Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPI or Key Success Indicators (KSI), help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals.

Once an organization has analyzed its mission, identified all its stakeholders, and defined its goals, it needs a way to measure progress toward those goals. Key Performance Indicators are those measurements.

What Are Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Key Performance Indicators are quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization. They will differ depending on the organization. A business may have as one of its Key Performance Indicators the percentage of its income that comes from return customers. A school may focus its Key Performance Indicators on graduation rates of its students. A Customer Service Department may have as one of its Key Performance Indicators, in line with overall company KPIs, percentage of customer calls answered in the first minute. A Key Performance Indicators for a social service organization might be number of clients assisted during the year.

Whatever Key Performance Indicators are selected, they must reflect the organization's goals, they must be key to its success,and they must be quantifiable (measurable). Key Performance Indicators usually are long-term considerations. The definition of what they are and how they are measured do not change often. The goals for a particular Key Performance Indicator may change as the organizations goals change, or as it get closer to achieving a goal.

Key Performance Indicators Reflect The Organizational Goals

An organization that has as one of its goals "to be the most profitable company in our industry" will have Key Performance Indicators that measure profit and related fiscal measures. "Pre-tax Profit" and "Shareholder Equity" will be among them. However, "Percent of Profit Contributed to Community Causes" probably will not be one of its Key Performance Indicators. On the other hand, a school is not concerned with making a profit, so its Key Performance Indicators will be different. KPIs like "Graduation Rate" and "Success In Finding Employment After Graduation", though different, accurately reflect the schools mission and goals.

Key Performance Indicators Must Be Quantifiable

If a Key Performance Indicator is going to be of any value, there must be a way to accurately define and measure it. "Generate More Repeat Customers" is useless as a KPI without some way to distinguish between new and repeat customers. "Be The Most Popular Company" won't work as a KPI because there is no way to measure the company's popularity or compare it to others.

It is also important to define the Key Performance Indicators and stay with the same definition from year to year. For a KPI of "Increase Sales", you need to address considerations like whether to measure by units sold or by dollar value of sales. Will returns be deducted from sales in the month of the sale or the month of the return? Will sales be recorded for the KPI at list price or at the actual sales price?

You also need to set targets for each Key Performance Indicator. A company goal to be the employer of choice might include a KPI of "Turnover Rate". After the Key Performance Indicator has been defined as "the number of voluntary resignations and terminations for performance, divided by the total number of employees at the beginning of the period" and a way to measure it has been set up by collecting the information in an HRIS, the target has to be established. "Reduce turnover by five percent per year" is a clear target that everyone will understand and be able to take specific action to accomplish.

Next: KPI Must be Key To Organizational Success

Key Performance Indicators Must be Key To Organizational Success

Many things are measurable. That does not make them key to the organization's success. In selecting Key Performance Indicators, it is critical to limit them to those factors that are essential to the organization reaching its goals. It is also important to keep the number of Key Performance Indicators small just to keep everyone's attention focused on achieving the same KPIs.

That is not to say, for instance, that a company will have only three or four total KPIs in the company. Rather there will be three or four Key Performance Indicators for the company and all the units within it will have three, four, or five KPIs that support the overall company goals and can be "rolled up" into them.

If a company Key Performance Indicator is "Increased Customer Satisfaction", that KPI will be focused differently in different departments. The Manufacturing Department may have a KPI of "Number of Units Rejected by Quality Inspection", while the Sales Department has a KPI of "Minutes A Customer Is On Hold Before A Sales Rep Answers". Success by the Sales and Manufacturing Departments in meeting their respective departmental Key Performance Indicators will help the company meet its overall KPI.

Good Key Performance Indicators vs. Bad

Bad:

• Title of KPI: Increase Sales
• Defined: Change in Sales volume from month to month
• Measured: Total of Sales By Region for all region
• Target: Increase each month

What's missing? Does this measure increases in sales volume by dollars or units? If by dollars, does it measure list price or sales price? Are returns considered and if so do the appear as an adjustment to the KPI for the month of the sale or are they counted in the month the return happens? How do we make sure each sales office's volume numbers are counted in one region, i.e. that none are skipped or double counted? How much, by percentage or dollars or units, do we want to increase sales volumes each month?(Note: Some of these questions may be answered by standard company procedures.)

Good:

• Title of KPI: Employee Turnover
• Defined: The total of the number of employees who resign for whatever reason, plus the number of employees terminated for performance reasons, and that total divided by the number of employees at the beginning of the year. Employees lost due to Reductions in Force (RIF) will not be included in this calculation.
• Measured: The HRIS contains records of each employee. The separation section lists reason and date of separation for each employee. Monthly, or when requested by the SVP, the HRIS group will query the database and provide Department Heads with Turnover Reports. HRIS will post graphs of each report on the Intranet.
• Target: Reduce Employee Turnover by 5% per year.

What Do I Do With Key Performance Indicators?

Once you have good Key Performance Indicators defined, ones that reflect your organization's goals, one that you can measure, what do you do with them? You use Key Performance Indicators as a performance management tool, but also as a carrot. KPIs give everyone in the organization a clear picture of what is important, of what they need to make happen. You use that to manage performance. You make sure that everything the people in your organization do is focused on meeting or exceeding those Key Performance Indicators. You also use the KPIs as a carrot. Post the KPIs everywhere: in the lunch room, on the walls of every conference room, on the company intranet, even on the company web site for some of them. Show what the target for each KPI is and show the progress toward that target for each of them. People will be motivated to reach those KPI targets. Page 1: Key Performance Indicators

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How the 80/20 rule can help you be more effective

Pareto's Principle - The 80-20 Rule - From F. John Reh, Your Guide to Management.

In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth. In the late 1940s, Dr. Joseph M. Juran inaccurately attributed the 80/20 Rule to Pareto, calling it Pareto's Principle. While it may be misnamed, Pareto's Principle or Pareto's Law as it is sometimes called, can be a very effective tool to help you manage effectively.

Where It Came From
After Pareto made his observation and created his formula, many others observed similar phenomena in their own areas of expertise. Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph Juran, working in the US in the 1930s and 40s recognized a universal principle he called the "vital few and trivial many" and reduced it to writing. In an early work, a lack of precision on Juran's part made it appear that he was applying Pareto's observations about economics to a broader body of work. The name Pareto's Principle stuck, probably because it sounded better than Juran's Principle.

As a result, Dr. Juran's observation of the "vital few and trivial many", the principle that 20 percent of something always are responsible for 80 percent of the results, became known as Pareto's Principle or the 80/20 Rule. You can read his own description of the events in the Juran Institute article titled Juran's Non-Pareto Principle.

What It Means
The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial. In Pareto's case it meant 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth. In Juran's initial work he identified 20 percent of the defects causing 80 percent of the problems. Project Managers know that 20 percent of the work (the first 10 percent and the last 10 percent) consume 80 percent of your time and resources. You can apply the 80/20 Rule to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world.

You know 20 percent of you stock takes up 80 percent of your warehouse space and that 80 percent of your stock comes from 20 percent of your suppliers. Also 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your sales staff. 20 percent of your staff will cause 80 percent of your problems, but another 20 percent of your staff will provide 80 percent of your production. It works both ways.

How It Can Help You
The value of the Pareto Principle for a manager is that it reminds you to focus on the 20 percent that matters. Of the things you do during your day, only 20 percent really matter. Those 20 percent produce 80 percent of your results. Identify and focus on those things. When the fire drills of the day begin to sap your time, remind yourself of the 20 percent you need to focus on. If something in the schedule has to slip, if something isn't going to get done, make sure it's not part of that 20 percent.

There is a management theory floating around at the moment that proposes to interpret Pareto's Principle in such a way as to produce what is called Superstar Management. The theory's supporters claim that since 20 percent of your people produce 80 percent of your results you should focus your limited time on managing only that 20 percent, the superstars. The theory is flawed, as we are discussing here because it overlooks the fact that 80 percent of your time should be spent doing what is really important. Helping the good become better is a better use of your time than helping the great become terrific. Apply the Pareto Principle to all you do, but use it wisely.

Manage This Issue
Pareto's Principle, the 80/20 Rule, should serve as a daily reminder to focus 80 percent of your time and energy on the 20 percent of you work that is really important. Don't just "work smart", work smart on the right things.

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July 2, 2005

Microsoft to Pay I.B.M. $775 Million in Settlement

By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 - Microsoft agreed on Friday to pay I.B.M. $775 million to settle claims growing out of the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against Microsoft in 1995. I.B.M. will also receive a $75 million credit toward the use of Microsoft software.

The settlement is one of the largest in a series of settlements Microsoft has struck in its effort to resolve its legal troubles after Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of Federal District Court in Washington ruled in 2000 that it had engaged in anticompetitive practices.

I.B.M., in negotiating a settlement with Microsoft, held back from filing a separate lawsuit. Indeed, the two rivals have recently become partners in some areas. For example, Microsoft will use I.B.M. microprocessor chips in its new game console, the Xbox 360, which is scheduled to be introduced this fall.

Microsoft executives said the settlement with I.B.M. addressed all discriminatory pricing and overcharge claims growing from the federal antitrust case, including claims related to the I.B.M. OS/2 operating system and SmartSuite products. Under the deal, I.B.M. agreed to defer consideration of filing claims related to I.B.M.'s server hardware and server software business for two years.

"It's an important milestone for us that marks the end of a significant effort," Microsoft's chief counsel, Brad Smith, said.

An I.B.M. spokesman, Scott Brooks, said the company was pleased to "resolve this amicably without having to go to greater extremes and we're looking ahead."

Executives at the companies said settlement negotiations began in November 2003 and were stepped up in the last two months because "tolling agreements" that extended the statue of limitations on claims related to the federal antitrust case were set to expire this month.

The claims first emerged in the late 1980's when Microsoft and I.B.M. agreed to develop the OS/2 operating system, which was intended as a replacement for MS-DOS, the original operating system for the I.B.M. PC.

In November 1989, the two companies publicly agreed to develop OS/2 first for high-end computing systems with more than four megabytes of memory. Microsoft, however, proceeded to develop its Windows operating system as an alternative for business customers, undercutting the agreement.

Microsoft's strategy affected not only I.B.M, but software makers like Lotus Development, which initially developed its software for OS/2 and not Windows.

Judge Jackson's ruling found that "from 1994 to 1997 Microsoft consistently pressured I.B.M. to reduce its support for software products that competed with Microsoft's offerings, and it used its monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems to punish I.B.M. for its refusal to cooperate."

Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University, said that Microsoft had managed to resolve many of its legal troubles without radically altering its conduct.

"It's paying for peace," Professor Gavil said, "but it's not changing its behavior in any significant way."

In recent years, Microsoft has spent more than $3 billion settling lawsuits by its rivals, including a $1.6 billion deal with Sun Microsystems in 2004 and a $750 million deal with America Online, part of Time Warner, in 2003.

In April Microsoft agreed to settle claims with Gateway Computer arising out of the government's antitrust suit for $150 million. Microsoft said earlier this year that it would place $550 million in reserve for further antitrust-related claims.

The company said Friday that it would describe how it would account for the I.B.M. settlement when it reports its quarterly financial results in July.

"This is just cleaning up the remaining mess on the floor," said Robert E. Litan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Justice Department prosecutor.

Mr. Litan also noted that while Microsoft's software monopoly in the home PC market has remained durable despite the federal antitrust ruling, the rise of the open-source Linux operating system, which is freely distributed, has proven a powerful counterweight to Microsoft's power in the corporate server market.

"You cannot underestimate the impact of Linux" on the computing industry in recent years, he said.

Microsoft also settled with Novell in November 2004 for $536 million for claims related to the antitrust case; however, Novell has since filed a second antitrust suit against Microsoft related to its WordPerfect word-processing software application.

Microsoft is also facing a lawsuit by RealNetworks over its Windows Media Player software and is appealing a $600 million antitrust ruling brought by European regulators.

As part of the ruling in 2000, Judge Jackson ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies to curb its monopolistic practices. But the next year, the new Bush administration decided not to seek a breakup and the Justice Department settled in 2002.

Shares of I.B.M. shares rose 47 cents on Friday, to close at $74.67. Microsoft shares declined 13 cents, to close at $24.71.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/02/technology/02soft.html

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Microsoft’s Own Peer-to-Peer Application

Microsoft’s Own Peer-to-Peer Application

New York, June 20 (Kashar News): Microsoft is developing an alternative to BitTorrent Codenamed Avalanche, the program makes it easy to share content by dividing files such as software, audio or video, into chunks, much like BitTorrent.

Downloading will not be possible without a 'publisher's certificate'. In other words, it will have built in DRM technology. End users request the file parts from other users' hard drives and reassemble them to create the original file.

Avalanche’s main advantage over BitTorrent resides in one small, some will say, but actually very important aspect: before dividing the file into smaller bits, the program attaches a special algorithm whose purpose is to provide every piece of the file with information about the others.

The project came to light when Microsoft researchers in Cambridge, England, revealed they are developing the file-sharing technology to distribute big files such as films, television programs, security patches and software applications to users over the Internet.

A prototype of Avalanche is undergoing tests by distributing software to several thousand software beta testers, a research engineer demonstrating the software in Cambridge said. Avalanche can transmit a file of 4 gigabytes in size in as little as one day, down from about two weeks when it sends a program directly, he said.

Source: http://www.kashar.net/technews/complete.asp?id=1524

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What's In a Name? A Story of Palm Inc.

The company that created the first PalmPilots was called Palm Computing, Inc.; the name was changed to Palm Inc. in 2000. By then, Palm had started licensing its operating system to other companies, such as Handspring and Sony. As these licensees began introducing their own custom extensions to the OS--improved address books or high-resolution screens, for example--it became increasingly problematic for a single company to develop the OS and work with third parties on custom extensions, while at the same time creating devices that would compete with those of the third-party licensees.

So in 2003, Palm split into two companies. The corporate steward of the Palm OS became PalmSource, while the hardware company became PalmOne. A third company was created solely to administer the Palm brand name.

Since then, a whole generation of Palm OS-based devices has appeared with names like Tungsten and Zire. We might call them Palms, but officially they aren't: They're PalmOne PDAs.

And PalmSource, for its part, began talking about different versions of the Palm OS: Garnet, the version of Palm OS 5 running on the most advanced devices today; and Cobalt, the version previously known as Palm OS 6, which has yet to appear.

Eventually, PalmSource has said, it will be moving to a Linux-based OS because the Palm OS as it exists today simply isn't equipped to handle the advanced features that people have come to expect in PDAs. More recently, PalmSource has purchased a Chinese software company, China MobileSoft, with an eye towards developing mobile-phone operating systems that will look a little like the Palm OS but will have completely different underpinnings.

Anyway, the Palm name game is going to change in a major way: At the PalmSource mobile developers conference a few weeks ago, PalmOne CEO Ed Colligan announced that PalmOne has bought out PalmSource's share of the Palm brand holding company. That will allow PalmOne to make Palm PDAs again--and indeed, to change its name to Palm Inc. PalmSource gets to use the name Palm during a four-year transition period, but at some point the operating system won't be called the Palm OS anymore.

What's the impact going to be on Palm users? Well, for those who never stopped calling their PalmOne PDAs Palms, not much. Obviously this is one reason why PalmOne made the deal: Colligan believes most people think of a Palm as a piece of hardware. And as long as that hardware runs the OS they expect, most people probably don't care whether that OS is called Palm or Garnet or Joe Schmoe.

It's a little more problematic for people who were interested in Palm-based devices from third-party Palm OS licensees. How do you communicate to prospective customers that your software is what gives a device the look and feel associated with Palms, without mentioning the word Palm? You can argue that the development and marketing of such devices doesn't appear to be a booming business these days. Sony, you'll remember, quit offering Clies. But what about companies that might want to develop competitors to PalmOne's Treo?

Meanwhile, taken from the other direction, what's to stop PalmOne (or Palm, by then) to sell me a device that doesn't have the OS formerly known as Palm on it? In theory, at least, PalmOne could start offering Palms based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile software.

In short, the coming branding transition could make things confusing for Palm buyers--particularly for people who are upgrading and have to worry about support for legacy applications. PalmOne has a four-year deal to continue licensing PalmSource operating systems, so there's no cause for immediate alarm, but down the road we'll all have to pay closer attention to what's in a Palm.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121184,tk,dn060905X,00.asp

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US Air Force considering 'weapons of tomorrow'

May 25, 2005 01:20 ISTLast Updated: May 25, 2005 02:11 IST
The United States Air Force is testing 'weapons of tomorrow' including space weapons and an experimental microsatellite with the capability to disrupt other nations' military satellites. There is also a proposal to build a global strike space plane that can carry munitions halfway around the world in 45 minutes, and a 'Rods From God' programme that can hurl dense metal rods at targets on the ground with the force of a small nuclear weapon. Other programmes will use laser beams or radio waves to disable targets, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

While the Air Force is focused on the future, with no credible opposition or potential in the air, the Pentagon is already using devices which would disrupt Iraqi insurgent attempts to set off deadly roadside bombs by remote control. The devices shipped from the US can interfere with the enemy's radio waves so that the bombs would not go off.

Weapons in space worries The New York Times which, in an editorial on Tuesday, called on Congress and the Bush administration to assess whether a multilateral treaty to ban space weapons might not leave the nation far safer than a unilateral drive to put the first weapons in space.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/may/25us.htm

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India becoming e-Waste dustbin

NEW DELHI: Consider these facts and figures: More than 70 per cent of the electronic waste (e-waste) collected in Delhi's recycling units is actually exported or dumped by developed countries like the US. Despite a ban by the Central government, these countries illegally ship around 23,000 tonnes of e-waste every year to India and other countries in the subcontinent.

This alarming trend, among others, was revealed in a report presented by Toxics Link, a leading NGO working in toxics and waste issues, at a workshop organised by the Union ministry of environment and forests on Saturday. The ministry conducted a series of seminars to address some of the prevalent issues, on the occasion of World Environment Day on Sunday.

According to environmentalists, e-w aste — generated from obsolete computers and discarded electronic components — contains over 1,000 different toxic substances like heavy metals, PVC plastics, brominated flame-retardants etc., harmful to human beings and the environment. In India, this was te is subjected to primitive and highly polluting recycling operations, which contaminate air, water and harms the health of workers.


Said Ravi Agarwal of Toxics Link: "We have been repeatedly stating that tonnes of e-waste are landing in various Indian ports for recycling. In the absence of access to customs data, this could never be verified. The report, however, squarely indicts developed countries like the US and UK."

As for solutions, Agarwal stressed a proper framework before working on a concrete plan of action. He said: "Broadly, there are a few issues that need to be addressed. Instead of coming out with the latest products every now and then, the computer industry should focus on products that last longer. That way, there will be lesser dumping of components."

A large amount of ewaste is being imported to India because it is cheaper to recycle it here. "The government needs to control or prohibit the movement of hazardous wastes to the country. We don't want to be the waste-bin of the world," said Agarwal.

Source: Kunal Doley - Times News Network [Sunday, June 05, 2005 09:11:09 Am]

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There's a Chinese in my alphabet soup

MUMBAI: Yet another Chinese product has hit the Mumbai market, but this one is a little more lofty than cheap toys or electronic goods. China is now offering itself as the new education destination, where one can get courses in everything from medicine, engineering, finance and economics to science and technology.

Chinese educationists from Tianjin, near Beijing, who are seeking Indian
students before their academic year begins in August, promise that the cost of education will be cheaper than that offered by other foreign countries. That's not all. English, and not Chinese, will be the language in which the courses will be taught.

"The minimum fee for any course will not exceed Rs 69,000 per year," said Wang Hong, vice-director, Tianjin Municipal Education commission, who, along with representatives of 17 universities in Tianjin, talked about Chinese universities and colleges at a five-star hotel in Andheri on Thursday.

As Beijing is already overcrowded with Chinese students, the country is now opening up Tianjin, about 120 km from the Chinese capital, to international students.

Universities like Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin Normal University,
Tianjin University of Finance and Technology, Tianjin University of Science and Technology and Nankai University are looking at Indian students who may wish to study there.

At last count, around 10,000 international students were studying in Tianjin, about 1,200 of them from India. "We have about 80 Indian students studying medicine at our university. Our textbooks, teaching and classroom interactions are all in English," said Han Rui, international affairs department, Tianjin Medical University. "In fact, most of the universities are sending their teachers to the UK to study the English language."

A four-year undergraduate course can cost Rs 92,000 per academic year while a Masters' course will be about Rs 1.38 lakh per year. A course in medicine can cost Rs 1.84 lakh per annum. "Our courses and certificates are valid in other countries, so students can get jobs easily," said Wang.

Traditional Chinese medicine is one course which the country is trying hard to sell to foreign students. "Every year we have more than 1,000 students from 20 countries studying traditional Chinese medicine," said Prof Xu Li, vice-dean, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Source - TIMES NEWS NETWORK - Sandhya Nair

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Generating Pythagorean Triples

There is a simple formula that gives all the Pythagorean triples.
Suppose that m and n are two positive integers, with m < n. Then n2 - m2, 2mn, and n2 + m2 is a Pythagorean triple. It's easy to check algebraically that the sum of the squares of the first two is the same as the square of the last one. Why is it that every triple can be generated in this manner? Here are the first few triples for m and n between 1 and 10.

Notice any patterns? m= 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ---+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ n= 2 [3,4,5] 3 [8,6,10] [5,12,13] 4 [15,8,17] [12,16,20] [7,24,25] 5 [24,10,26] [21,20,29] [16,30,34] [9,40,41] 6 [35,12,37] [32,24,40] [27,36,45] [20,48,52] [11,60,61] 7 [48,14,50] [45,28,53] [40,42,58] [33,56,65] [24,70,74] [13,84,85] 8 [63,16,65] [60,32,68] [55,48,73] [48,64,80] [39,80,89] [28,96,100] [15,112,113] 9 [80,18,82] [77,36,85] [72,54,90] [65,72,97] [56,90,106] [45,108,117] [32,126,130] [17,144,145] 10 [99,20,101] [96,40,104] [91,60,109] [84,80,116] [75,100,125] [64,120,136] [51,140,149] [36,160,164] [19,180,181]

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Microsoft sued for stealing software - May 18 2005 by Reuters

Microsoft illegally took technology used to link spreadsheet data between two of its programs from a Guatemalan inventor, lawyers said during opening statements at a jury trial that started on Tuesday.

In a lawsuit, Carlos Armando Amado said he filed a patent application in 1990 for software that links Microsoft's Excel program with its Access database application via a single spreadsheet, and that he unsuccessfully tried to sell it to Microsoft two years later.
Amado is seeking damages that could exceed $500m in the lawsuit filed in the US District Court of Central California.

Microsoft began using his software without permission in various versions of Access, such as Access 95, 97, 2000 and 2002, according to Amado, who said he created the technology while he was a graduate student at Stanford University.

The suit did not specify a figure for damages, but Amado's attorneys estimated that it was about $2 per software copy sold, which would equal about half a billion dollars based on the software sold to date.

Joel Freed, Microsoft's attorney, disputed Amado's claims, saying Microsoft started working on such technology in 1989, three years before Amado approached the software giant with his idea.
At issue is a technology that lets computer users transfer data back and forth between Excel and Access by using a spreadsheet.

Freed said the plaintiff had recreated the data transfer for the courtroom. "It's never happened with anyone outside this courtroom," he said.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company currently has about 35 other patent infringement suits pending. The jury trial is expected to last two weeks.

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Open source apps given to millions in India - by Ingrid Marson May 26 2005

OpenOffice and Firefox included on freely distributed CDs...
The Indian government is trying to encourage the use of computers across the country by distributing free CDs that contain localised versions of popular open source applications.

The government has started distributing CDs containing Tamil-language versions of various open source applications, including the Firefox browser, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Columba email client. It plans to freely distribute 3.5 million copies of the CD to Tamil speakers worldwide, according to RKVS Raman, a researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, an organisation involved in the production of the CD.


Raman said the CDs are in considerable demand, following a newspaper and television advertising campaign last month. "We have had a tremendous response to this [initiative]," he said. "In the first two weeks of the campaign we got about 100,000 hits daily on the website offering CDs, and about two to three thousand downloads [of Tamil-language applications]. We have already sent out around 50,000 CDs and have a backlog of 35,000." Once the requested CDs have been sent out, further copies of the CDs will be distributed with computer magazines and newspapers, according to Raman.

Even the President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, has taken an interest in the project and met the team involved in the production of the CD earlier this month.

The next stage of the project is to distribute CDs containing applications in Hindi, the national language of India. This stage will be launched on 21 June and is likely to involve more than the 3.5 million CDs earmarked for the current phase, said Raman. Eventually, the government plans to release CDs in all of the 22 official languages of India.

Raman believes open source software brings two main advantages to the Indian population - cost, and the freedom to modify the software. "We are sometimes not comfortable with Western user interfaces - they don't make sense in our culture, particularly for rural people who haven't had much access to technology. If we want to modify the software we have to have access to the code," he said.

The Indian government's decision to ship free software in this way is likely to be a blow to Microsoft, which plans to release a low-cost version of Windows in India soon. Microsoft originally hoped to release its Windows XP Starter Edition - a low-cost, feature-restricted version of Windows XP - by the end of March, but is now aiming for a June release.

Ingrid Marson writes for ZDNet UK

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Story of Sun Microsystem's StarOffice

StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000.

Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.

The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats and other resources.

Source: http://about.openoffice.org/

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At 30, I am richer than most IIT/ IIM grads - Rishiraj Nath

June 01, 2005

I have always understood that success is hard to get at the 'right time'. That is when a student really needs to work hard. My schooling was at Central School, a very simple school in New Delhi. I was always notorious at school for cheating and bunking classes. My average score was 44 percent. I never got more than 35 percent in Hindi and Sanskrit, but I always managed to pass all examinations.

I would dream of driving a Ford Mustang GT, which I would watch from bus stands during my school days. Whenever I bunked school, I would to go near the embassies to pass time, watch the lovely cars with blue number plates (which all embassy cars have), watch the free movies they showed and attend their festivals.

Class X. I managed to get a first class. Two years passed by. I had no idea what to do.
I did not appear for any entrance exam. I scored 57 percent in Physics-Chemistry-Mathematics in Class XII. The world was dark for me. I was not even eligible to appear for many entrance exams.

My parents were good enough to understand I had some potential. As the youngest of three, my parents did not want me to waste time preparing for entrance exams. Coming from an engineer's family, they requested me to study engineering.

I managed to get an admission at the Poona University-affiliated Maharashtra Institute of Technology, only because my father paid Rs 125,000 from his PPF savings. My father told me: 'I am giving all my PPF savings only because I want to fulfil my responsibility of being your father'. 'If you pass your engineering exams,' he continued, 'and start to earn, I would be very happy.' He also said, 'If you can stand on your own feet, please come back or keep in touch. Else, don't show your face.' He paid my fees and expenses for four years at Pune.

I majored in Petroleum Engineering. No one really wants to study Petroleum Engineering -- that's why I got in. I was lucky to get a seat. I had no idea what the field was all about. I had visions of having to work at petrol pumps later on.

My Mechanical/ Electrical/ Computers and other counterparts would always taunt me that I would have to work at a petrol pump. Of course, I found I would have nothing to do with petrol or petrol pumps. I worked hard and topped the Petroleum Department with 78%. During the campus interviews, Schlumberger, the leading oil services company, offered me a job at $80,000 per annum with four months vacation every year. My friends who taunted me ended up with jobs in Indian companies with starting salary of Rs 4,000.

After two months of work, I would come home to Delhi for a month. I started my career in France and visited 30 countries in the course of my job. In two years, I had a car, two houses, enough bank balance. I was only 23 years old then. Life got a little boring because I had all my needs and luxuries covered. I then decided to do a Masters in the UK in Petroleum Engineering. I went to Heriot Watt University, and graduated with a 3.8 GPA.

I now work with a French oil company. I work for six weeks in Paris or London and I come back to India for six. I also have an insurance package of $401,000, which can be claimed anywhere in the world. Today I am 30, married, with nine years of experience working abroad. I have never worked in India.

I am neither an IIT graduate nor an MBA holder. When I compare myself with the IIT/ IIM or any other software engineering graduate my age abroad, I feel happy. I have seen how they live, how miserly they are, how they have to save money.

I have also started Archana Petroleum Scholarship, after my mother. It helps economically backward students at the Poona University Petroleum Department.

- source rediffmail.com

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Biodata of Mitchell Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet Application)

Mitchell Kapor, 54, is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses.

He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. At Yale, he was very involved with the college's commercial radio station, WYBC-FM, where he served as Music Director and Program Director.

In the 1970’s Mr. Kapor worked as a disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station in Hartford, Connecticut; became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and taught TM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa; and worked as an entry-level computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later called Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company.

In 1978 he bought an Apple II personal computer and worked as an independent software consultant; as the co-developer of Tiny Troll, the first graphics and statistics program for the Apple II; as a product manager for Personal Software Inc., the publisher of VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet; and as the designer and programmer (in BASIC) of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.

He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, created Lotus 1-2-3. He served as the President (later Chairman) and Chief Executive Officer of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and as a Director until 1987. In 1983, Lotus’ first year of operations, the company achieved revenues of $53,000,000 and had a successful public offering. In 1984 the company tripled in revenue to $156,000,000. The number of employees grew to over a thousand by 1985.

After leaving executive management at Lotus, he spent 1986 and 1987 completing work on his favorite product, Lotus Agenda, the first application for Personal Information Management (PIM), and as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 1987-1990 Mr. Kapor served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ON Technology, a developer of software applications for workgroup computing. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.

In 1992 and 1993 he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state. He also served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.

From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab where he taught courses on software design, Democracy and the Internet, and digital community.

For almost 20 years, Mr. Kapor has been an investor in high-technology start-up companies (through Kapor Enterprises, Inc.) and an advisor to entrepreneurs. He was a founding investor of UUNET and Real Networks. He is also Chairman of the Board of Linden Research, founded by Philip Rosedale, former CTO of Real Networks.

From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. He has also served on the boards of Groove Networks founded by Ray Ozzie, the developer of Lotus Notes; Ximian, and Reactivity.

From 1984 until its dissolution in 1998, Mr. Kapor served as a trustee of the Kapor Family Foundation. Beginning in 1997, he created and endowed the Mitchell Kapor Foundation (www.mkf.org), a private foundation focused on the intersection of health and the environment, the social impact of information technology, and the removing barriers to full participation in education and the workplace by historically disadvantaged groups.

In 2003 he became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation (www.mozilla.org), which is dedicated to the development and promulgation of standards-compliant open source web browser software.

Mr. Kapor is a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute (www.lpfi.org), a San Francisco-based non-profit research organization, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in the workplace and support the values of an inclusive society.

Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to publications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Communications of the ACM. Mr. Kapor is married and lives in San Francisco, California.

http://www.kapor.com/bio/index.html

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Microsoft Fellowship for 2 Indians

HOUSTON: Microsoft Research has named two Indian Americans amongst the first five recipients of its New Faculty Fellowship Awards, a new programme that honours early-career university professors who demonstrate exceptional talent for novel research and thought leadership in their discipline.

The two Indian Americans Subhash Khot and Radhika Nagpal were selected from a pool of 110 nominees representing universities across the US. Khot and Nagpal, along with three other fellows, will receive a $200,000 cash grant to pursue their innovative research work in computer science.

The winners are also given the opportunity to explore collaborations with some of the top researchers working in their area of interest at Microsoft Research. "We have much to learn, and much to gain, from today's talented young minds," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

"Even early in their teaching careers, these award winners are pushing the boundaries of computer science research in exciting new directions. The intellectual curiosity, creative drive and thought leadership they demonstrate is exactly the sort of initiative we seek to encourage in developing programs like the New Faculty Fellowship Awards."

Subhash Khot is a first-year assistant professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Khot's research tackles fundamental questions regarding which problems can and cannot be solved quickly on a computer.

The questions Khot addresses in his work often have deep connections to diverse areas in mathematics, logic, cryptography and computer science. Radhika Nagpal is a first-year assistant professor of computer science in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her research interest is in engineering self-organising, self-repairing systems, using inspiration from biology, and in better understanding robust collective behaviour in biological systems.

The University Relations group at Microsoft Research established the New Faculty Fellowship Awards programme to identify and support exceptional first-year, second-year and third-year professors who are advancing the state of the art of computer science research.

Microsoft Research said it recognises that until young professors can build a reputation, they typically struggle to secure adequate funding for their research work. The programme accepts just one nominee per university and includes a rigorous, multi-round selection process that culminates in live interviews before a distinguished panel of reviewers from Microsoft Research and the academic community.

"This programme offers a major boost to a young faculty member with an exciting research vision," said Maria Klawe, dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, who helped judge the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Awards. "It provides support and credibility for long-term and perhaps risky initiatives.

This is extremely important for the field of computing because computing has been trying to cope with major reductions in the funding of fundamental research by government and industry," she said.

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Netscape 8 Clashes With Internet Explorer's XML Rendering

from http://www.techsmec.com/index.php/2005/05/27/netscape_8_clashes_with_internet_explore

If you view RSS feeds in Internet Explorer, but you've recently downloaded Netscape 8, you may have noticed a few problems, namely that you can't see them any more.
"We have just confirmed an issue that has started to be reported on newsgroups and forums that, after installing Netscape 8, the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work," wrote Dave Massy, senior programme manager for IE, on the Microsoft IE blog.He posted the following workaround.

1. Uninstall Netscape 8
2. START->RUN
1. Type: regedit 2. Hit ENTER
3. Navigate to the following:
4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension
5. Highlight and right-click the node titled "xml" and select delete.
6. Restart Internet Explorer

Unfortunately if Netscape 8 remains installed then the registry key is continually rewritten so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE.

According to AOL, however, this workaround is unnecessary. "This issue affects a very small number of users who visit sites that require that advanced technology," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, implying that AOL users may not be the most advanced of netizens if they don't bother with RSS feeds.

"We would not encourage people to uninstall or effect their browser settings," Weinstein said, attempting to protect Netscape 8's currently small share of the browser market. "It's a minor issue."

Netscape said they would release a fix next week.

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Gates's vision - and failure thereof

Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible.

In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of blinkered thinking does Microsoft -- which could be capable of pursuing lots of profitable strategies that don't involve fighting the future tooth and nail -- no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it's time for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect and CEO.

I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't.

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Microsoft and the Commoditization of Software

This article is from the following website: http://www.synthesist.net/writing/onleavingms.html

Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software
(c) 2003 David Stutz

The market for shrink-wrap PC software began its slow upmarket ooze into Christensen obsolescence right around the time that Microsoft really hit its stride. That was also the time of the Internet wave, a phenomenon that Microsoft co-opted without ever really internalizing into product wisdom. While those qualified to move the state of the art forward went down in the millennial flames of the dotcom crash, Microsoft's rigorous belief in the physics of business reality saved both the day and the profits. But the tide had turned, and a realization that "the net" was a far more interesting place than "the PC" began to creep into the heads of consumers and enterprises alike.

During this period, most core Microsoft products missed the Internet wave, even while claiming to be leading the parade. Office has yet to move past the document abstraction, despite the world's widespread understanding that websites (HTML, HTTP, various embedded content types, and Apache mods) are very useful things. Windows has yet to move past its PC-centric roots to capture a significant part of the larger network space, although it makes a hell of a good client. Microsoft developer tools have yet to embrace the loosely coupled mindset that today's leading edge developers apply to work and play.

Microsoft's reluctance to adopt networked ways is understandable. Their advantaged position has been built over the years by adhering to the tenet that software running on a PC is the natural point at which to integrate hardware and applications. Unfortunately, network protocols have turned out to be a far better fit for this middleman role, and Microsoft, intent on propping up the PC franchise, has had to resist fully embracing the network integration model. This corporate case of denial has left a vacuum, of course, into which hardware companies, enterprises, and disgruntled Microsoft wannabes have poured huge quantities of often inferior, but nonetheless requirements-driven, open source software. Microsoft still builds the world's best client software, but the biggest opportunity is no longer the client. It still commands the biggest margin, but networked software will eventually eclipse client-only software.

As networked computing infrastructure matures, the PC client business will remain important in the same way that automotive manufacturers, rail carriers, and phone companies remained important while their own networks matured. The PC form factor will push forward; the Pocket PC, the Tablet PC, and other forms will emerge. But automakers, railroads, and phone companies actually manufacture their products, rather than selling intangible bits on a CD to hardware partners. Will Microsoft continue to convince its partners that software is distinctly valuable by itself? Or will the commodity nature of software turn the industry on its head? The hardware companies, who actually manufacture the machines, smell blood in the water, and the open source software movement is the result.

Especially in a maturing market, software expertise still matters, and Microsoft may very well be able to sidestep irrelevance as it has in the past. The term "PC franchise" is not just a soundbite; the number of programs written for the PC that do something useful (drive a loom, control a milling machine, create a spreadsheet template, edit a recording...) is tremendous. But to continue leading the pack, Microsoft must innovate quickly. If the PC is all that the future holds, then growth prospects are bleak. I've spent a lot of time during the last few years participating in damage-control of various sorts, and I respect the need for serious adult supervision. Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years. Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.

If Microsoft is unable to innovate quickly enough, or to adapt to embrace network-based integration, the threat that it faces is the erosion of the economic value of software being caused by the open source software movement. This is not just Linux. Linux is certainly a threat to Microsoft's less-than-perfect server software right now (and to its desktop in the not-too-distant future), but open source software in general, running especially on the Windows operating system, is a much bigger threat. As the quality of this software improves, there will be less and less reason to pay for core software-only assets that have become stylized categories over the years: Microsoft sells OFFICE (the suite) while people may only need a small part of Word or a bit of Access. Microsoft sells WINDOWS (the platform) but a small org might just need a website, or a fileserver. It no longer fits Microsoft's business model to have many individual offerings and to innovate with new application software. Unfortunately, this is exactly where free software excels and is making inroads. One-size-fits-all, one-app-is-all-you-need, one-api-and-damn-the-torpedoes has turned out to be an imperfect strategy for the long haul.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't.

Exciting new networked applications are being written. Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed. To avoid dire consequences, Microsoft should favor an approach that tolerates and embraces the diversity of the open source approach, especially when network-based integration is involved. There are many clever and motivated people out there, who have many different reasons to avoid buying directly into a Microsoft proprietary stack. Microsoft must employ diplomacy to woo these accounts; stubborn insistence will be both counterproductive and ineffective. Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols.

Why be distracted into looking backwards by the commodity cloners of open source? Useful as cloning may be for price-sensitive consumers, the commodity business is low-margin and high-risk. There is a new frontier, where software "collectives" are being built with ad hoc protocols and with clustered devices. Robotics and automation of all sorts is exposing a demand for sophisticated new ways of thinking. Consumers have an unslakable thirst for new forms of entertainment. And hardware vendors continue to push towards architectures that will fundamentally change the way that software is built by introducing fine-grained concurrency that simply cannot be ignored. There is no clear consensus on systems or application models for these areas. Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.

Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!

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New to blogs

Hi everyone. This is my first attempt towards using blogs. To keep readers interest I will try to post variety of contents. Please make sure to visit.

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When IITs scale the Wall - Times of India News Network

NEW DELHI:
Have the Chinese fallen for our IITs now? One hundred engineering and technology institutions modelled on the IIT — that’s what a member of the Chinese education delegation claimed his country was working towards. So when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited IIT-Delhi, it was not merely a case of the world’s factory house meeting the back office. It was an affirmation of China’s marvel at India’s success in the IT and ITeS sectors. And for India, a small and subtle warning — watch out, the dragon’s on your tail. China’s fascination with India’s success in IT is no secret; neither is its wish to emulate and surpass it. But none of that ambition was on display when the Mr Jiabao addressed students at IIT-Delhi. Instead, there was appreciation and respect for India’s premier technology institutions. If one looked carefully and listened attentively, one would catch the determination that has marked China. Fielding a question on China’s plans for IIT-like institutes, the Chinese premier said that the IITs were “famous institutions and world-class”, but that China already has 2,000 institutes of higher learning with 20 million students. However, the visiting prime minister didn’t commit himself either way.

He said that India had made tremendous progress in the past 11 years; he had visited India in 1994. It’s a progress that would be matched by his country. While India had made strides in IT, China was the manufacturing giant.

Even as he congratulated his country on maintaining a 9.5% growth rate for 20 years, he acknowledged that there was much more that needed to be achieved. “Innovation” is the key and the need to own intellectual property rights. And at that moment, if one were attentive, it became obvious where China’s heading next.

If one missed the import, here’s something to consider. By the end of 1998, China had 22,549 scientific research institutes, including 5,778 research and development institutes employing 9,35,000 people specialising in scientific research.

Universities and colleges have 1,487 research and development institutes for science and engineering, industry, agriculture and medicine to form a complete scientific research system.

In the new spirit of partnership, Mr Jiabao pushed for greater interaction between the youth of the country. “Youth hold hope for the future of our countries. I would like to see further increase in the quota for Indian students to study in China and the same can be done by India.”

Mr Jiabao said his country would host 100 students from India on a reciprocal basis and advocated enhanced exchange of scholars.

He had proposed this to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I hope young people of the two countries will stand together and work hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder for a better future.”

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Re: H1-B Visa Cap (source:rediff.com)

WASHINGTON: Anand Patel borrowed around $ 50,000 (about Rs 22 lakhs) from banks and family funds in Ahmedabad in 2001 to come to United States and earn a master's degree in electrical engineering at a reputed California university. When he graduated in May 2003, he got a one-year Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from US immigration authorities, which typically allows students to stay on in the US for Optional Practical Training (OPT) for up to a year. This is the year-long window, during which foreign students have, for years, successfully sought work and been absorbed into the American work force. Companies that invite them for training usually sponsor them for a H1-B work visa. But the job market was down in 2003 and Patel did not find a placement till February this year. A tech company, which finally offered him a job also agreed to file his H1-B papers.

Too late. With the lowering of H1-B visa cap from 195,000 in 2003 to 65,000 this year, the quota was exhausted by mid-February. The 2005 quota of 65,000 does not open till October this year. Patel's staying permit runs out in May, rendering him out of status with no option but to leave the US - till October at least, when he will have to apply for a new H1-B (provided he still has the job offer) from India. Thousands of Indian students in the US are facing such crises, which have been largely overshadowed by the furore over outsourcing. Immigration lawyers say they are being swamped by requests from foreign students to find some way out of this road block. The irony is that the 2003 quota of 195,000 was way above requirement and remained unfilled by nearly half. If Patel had found a placement before October, he might have easily got an H1-B from the previous year's quota.Some activists are trying to find a way out of this boondoggle.

On Wednesday, Indian-American immigration attorney, Paresh Shah, walked up to President Bush at a reception in Los Angeles and told him of the problem. Shah's suggestion: the 12,000 meritorious H1-B applications that were filed last year but overlapped into this year because of procedural delays can be recaptured under the unfilled 2003 quota by an executive order by the president. Shah says Bush, who thought the H1-B cap was 72,500, promised to examine the issue. Shah also met Bush advisor Karl Rove to apprise him of the problem.

But in the prevailing anti-immigration mood in the Congress, the students in limbo doubt if anything will happen. Shah argues that the recapturing can be done with a Presidential order without going before the Congress and that the idea is to only use last year's unfilled quota retrospectively.

Asked why they could not return to India given the abundant opportunities there, Patel and his ilk offer several reasons: They have spent up to $ 50,000 on graduating and it makes sense to work in the US for a "few years" to recoup that. They also want the benefit of experience in high-end work (Patel's specialisation is VLSI chip designing) in the US first instead of returning to India immediately for low-end work.

"You have to remember that we are no more crazy to remain in the US," Patel said. "There are exciting opportunities in India but it just makes practical sense and economic sense to stay here. We can either add value to this economy... or the jobs will go where we go even if it means it pays a little less."

Stuck in the middle in the debate between outsourcing jobs and importing foreign workers are tech companies such as Motorola, Cisco, Microsoft and others, who are being pilloried for migrating jobs abroad, yet can't hire local talent of a foreign hue when there simply aren't enough Americans for the job. Several studies show that less and less Americans are taking up physical and computer science in colleges, and the areas are beginning to be dominated by Asians.

Patel and others also pointed out that foreign students contribute billions of dollars to the US education system and if their numbers declined at the prospect of finding work in the US, the school system would suffer.

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