En la gestión de liderazgo y la comunicación

Computing, communication, and cognition are driving the fundamental changes in the way we live, love, labor, and learn. The advances in computing are obvious to most, but the growth of communications technologies has probably been more dramatic. The e-Business revolution is fundamentally about human interactions. Psychology and the cognitive sciences have illuminated the ways that people interact and learn together.

How does a business learn about its customers?

How does a consumer learn about new products?

How does a manufacturer or developer support customers?

These are all timeless questions, but technology has changed all the answers and will continue to do so for the next decade or more. What can we know with great certainty about the future of technology and what can we only guess at? There have been a number of efforts at projecting the future.

To understand the technological changes that underlie the opportunities in e-Business, one must include a backward look at the technologies that have brought us to this point and then take a prospective look at the basic sciences that will create new technologies that will continue to drive further change. Some things can be predicted to be as relentless as death and taxes. Others are as unpredictable as the weather.

Understanding which is which and developing strategies for dealing with relentless change and uncertain results is a key component of e-Business and the management of information technology.

3.1.1: Moore’s Law

Gordon Moore first observed that computer power was doubling every two years. That was later revised to 18 months. This means that since the invention of the

microprocessor, the

performance of a

microprocessor

has been

doubling every eighteen

months. This is directly related to the number of components that can be fit on a chip and is thus related to the minimum size of each component. Advances in basic physics and engineering have kept this law accurate for over five decades! The basic physics is in place to keep this going for another few doubling periods at least. Moore's Law is the simplified statement that computing power is doubling every 18 months. An alternate perspective states that the cost of equivalent computing power halves every 18 months. Either way, it creates a real challenge for everyone to keep up. On the other hand, it provides an extremely reliable roadmap to what technology platforms will be available in the future. This and the relentless doubling of bandwidth are the two most predictable events driving information management.

How long can this last? Gordon Moore thinks that it might begin to break down about 2017, but other observers are confident that physicists and engineers can come up with the new devices that can extend Moore’s Law for several more decades.

3.1.2: Bandwidth Scaling Law

For the last two decades, the

bandwidth of

communication on optical fibers is increasing exponentially just as is the power of the microprocessor. Examination of the graph of optical bandwidth reveals two numbers of intense interest. First the optical bandwidth for commercial networks has doubled over 9 times in the eighteen year period from 1979 to 1997. This indicates a doubling time of approximately two years. Notice also that the displacement between the best bandwidth in the laboratory and the best bandwidth in commercial deployment has a delay of just about 6 years. This means that commercial deployment of bandwidth will surely continue to double for the next six years leading to an overall increase in bandwidth of 8 times! Those who work in optical networking are confident that improvements in the physics and engineering will continue to improve the best laboratory bandwidth over this period. Thus we can say with a high degree of confidence that the bandwidth doubling will continue of the foreseeable future! This relentless march of bandwidth led George Gilder to declare that the future was a future of a "Bandwidth of Plenty."

3.1.3: Metcalf’s Law

Metcalf’s Law tells us that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of persons connected to that network. Although this can be given a mathematical basis, it is really more of an empirical law that must be applied in a context where all other things are equal.

The mathematical basis comes from the number of mathematical interactions between n persons. The n people would have n-1 other persons that they can interact with. That is everyone but himself or herself! The total number of such interactions is then given by:

Interactions = n(n-1)= n² – n

For large values of n, n² is so much larger than n that the n is just ignored.

Investors use Metcalf‘s Law as one way to assign value to a companies network. It is not the whole story, because it matters what people do once they are on that network. How long do they stay there? Some term this “stickiness.” If people stay on a network longer then the network is said to be “sticky”. The reasoning is that the longer someone stays on a network, the more probable it is that they will purchase something and return to purchase something else. Even more important is what the company’s business model is for extracting revenue from the network.

Metcalf’s Law is said to lead to “network economics” and is sometimes described by economists as “network externalities.”

In the early stages of the e-Business Tsunami, companies often overlooked the need to develop a business model for what they might do with their network. In the rush to establish a competitive advantage, companies “bought” customers with free goods and services. Netscape

pioneered this by giving away the browser. Later entrants tried giving away PC’s and even Internet connections.

There is no denying the advantage those companies like America On-line (AOL), Amazon.com, Yahoo, and eBay have established in their networks of users, but they have only been able to convert that network advantage into a business advantage by finding a business model that leads to revenues and earnings.

These large networks often lead to Communities. Although community development is closely related to Metcalf’s Law, Reed has pointed out that Metcalf’s law really relates to one-to-one interactions among n persons. He has proposed “Reed’s Law” as an alternative. If one calculates the number of communities that can be formed from n persons, then it turns out that this is proportional to n! (n factorial- or n x n-1 x n-2 x n-3….1). This is an even more powerful scaling factor than Metcalf’s law. Community development has been a very important part of the Internet. It is also a key component of internet based marketing scenarios.

3.2: Exponential Growth

The mathematics of e-Commerce is largely the mathematics of exponential growth. As we look at Moore’s Law, the Bandwidth Scaling Law, the growth of the market capitalization of technology based companies, the growth of e-Commerce revenues, and so many other variables, we see examples of exponential growth. Every exponential growth process has a doubling time. For Moore’s Law that is 18 months, for Bandwidth it has been about 12 months. For venture capital the doubling is about 5 years. In for the market capitalization of technology-based companies, the doubling period is slightly over two years.

In mathematics, exponential growth processes go on indefinitely with values driving toward infinity. In the physical world, exponential growth processes always end. They can never continue indefinitely since they run out of resources, people, potential markets, interest, energy, or something else. There are three general ways that exponential processes can end:

1. Saturation 2. Peaking

3. Catastrophic Collapse Saturation

When exponential processes end in saturation, the curve begins to flatten and then levels off at some higher level.

Peaking

When peaking occurs, the curve first flattens and then begins to fall.

Catastrophic collapse occurs when the function suddenly (discontinuously) drops to some undefined value rather than moving smoothly through a curve as in the other cases.

Real world processes are never as simple and clean as the mathematics used to describe them, but these three mathematical processes describe the general fate that awaits any exponential process. Exponential growth in any system will eventually saturate, peak, collapse, or a combination of these in sequence. The only thing that is sure is that exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely. It is not always easy to determine either when or how exponential growth ends. But it always does. That is one of the many characteristics that makes investing and business so interesting.

In the case of Moore’s Law and the Bandwidth Law, considerable evidence points to the continuation of exponential growth for several more decades. It would be quite surprising if the exponential growth of Venture capital and the exponential growth of e-Commerce continued for that long a time. They will be expected to level or peak. In fact the exponential curves for venture capital and market capitalization have shown behaviors that look to a combination of peaking and collapse since 2000.

3.3: Software Technologies

Network technologies and the Internet were created in their earliest incarnations for national security reasons. There needed to be a robust way to move data from site to site that could not be disrupted by nuclear war. The first networks were quickly put to work by the scientists working in the national laboratories to exchange scientific information.

It was not long until the use of the network spread to scientists outside the laboratories, first to those connected through Arpanet and then, with the support of the National Science Foundation, through the internet.

Understanding the physical and mathematical technologies that have enabled the platform for information technology is more straightforward than understanding the software technologies. Progress in software has always lagged progress in hardware and is characterized by more visible journeys down blind alleys and sudden shifts in approach.

Netscape had originally created its own approach to delivering interactivity within a browser, and after partnering with Sun dubbed the language JavaScript. Java and JavaScript had very different roots and different approaches, but at least the names sounded similar!

Microsoft both embraced Java and then began to co-opt Java into the Microsoft only environment. First Microsoft created Active-X components that were like Java in that they were downloaded from servers in live time and then ran on the client, but the Active-X components were Microsoft platform specific and could be written in a variety of Microsoft languages including the popular and easy to use

Visual Basic. Active-X operated in a much looser security architecture that made it both more dangerous and more powerful that Java. Next Microsoft added Microsoft specific extensions to Java that added very desirable functionality, but broke the “write once run anywhere”

paradigm of Java. In the view of many persons, there were now two Java’s – Pure Java and Microsoft Java. This was simply too much for Sun who sued and won. The resulting uncertainty caused both by the Microsoft actions and by the legal wrangling hampered further adoption of Java.

As the Java war continued between Sun and Microsoft, a new front emerged. The World Wide Web Consortium worked on extensions to HTML to create an XML standard. Microsoft raced to embrace XML, in part as an alternative to Java. In the meantime, software development in C, C++, Visual Basic, and HTML continued to dominate. Microsoft eventually introduced C# as an alternative to Java.

The advent of the network based computing paradigm reactivated this old argument. How much computing should be done server side and how much computing should be done client side? Not surprisingly, suppliers of servers and enterprise wide systems liked the idea of “thin clients” accessing resources from powerful servers.

Enterprise planners however saw the advantages of potentially controlling costs and improving the return on investment in computing.

They liked the creation of network tools that could be centrally purchased, centrally managed, and centrally supported.

Today Java is often used on the server to create interactivity through delivering HTML pages to the client that the client machine simply renders. Microsoft has adapted Visual Basic to do the same kinds of things in the Microsoft environment. They have also created a server centric solution called “Active Server Pages” (ASP) that is relatively easy to implement server side and is closely integrated with other Microsoft applications.

3.3.1:Software versus Services

Efforts to reconcile issues of server side versus user side power eventually led to two different architectures for web based computing.

One architecture was based upon Java and was supported by Sun, IBM, Oracle, and many other major enterprises. Predictably, Microsoft went its own way and created the .Net (pronounced “dot net”) architecture.

Each of these architectures was designed to enable powerful web services. Many organizations felt that computing was moving into a new era in which organizations would “rent” software rather than buying it. In this model, users would pay for the use of certain software applications that were hosted, maintained, and supported by the supplier.

Instead of installing new software on each computer, enterprises could simply purchase a subscription that would entitle the enterprise to access to software services provided over the network. The actually

technologies that would do that could be created from combinations of the tools discussed above including: databases, JavaScript, Java, and the Microsoft .NET tools. A company that provided such applications would logically be called an “Application Service Provider” or ASP.

The services provided are now often referred to as “web services.” The Gartner group defines Web services as "... a custom end-to-end application that interoperates with other commercial and custom software through a family of XML interfaces (like SOAP, UDDI and WSDL) to perform useful business functions." ASP has taken on two meanings that are quite different. The other ASP is a technology that comes from Microsoft called “Active Server Pages” that will be discussed later. This latter term refers to a server side technology that receives requests from a user’s browser and then actively creates customized pages, often from a database, for the user. It is now largely subsumed in the .NET architecture.

3.3.2: Databases

Today’s modern applications are dependent upon connections to massive databases and to the tools that can be used to link the data in those databases to web pages delivered to the consumer or user. True end-to-end e-Business is absolutely dependent upon such links and upon the ability of different databases to exchange information smoothly and rapidly.

The database industry is dominated by Oracle (31.1%), IBM (29.9%), and Microsoft (13.1%)(1999 figures), and each is vying with the others for domination of this crucial technology.

XML

Although XML is related to HTML, it is targeted at a different problem.

That problem is enabling differing applications to recognize data embedded in documents even though that data may have different formats in the different applications. XML, which is short for eXtensible Markup Language, allows the use of extended tags that can tag content and identify it as specific kinds of data. If the data is tagged properly and the applications know how to read the tags, then different kinds of applications can exchange data seamlessly. For example, a particular document may contain names and addresses of customers, but may also contain many other kinds of information. If the documents contain tags like <FirstName>, <FamilyName>, <City>, <State> or

<HomePhone> then applications reading the documents can identify and extract the key pieces of information and use that information to populate a database or display data in a specific format.

Using XML enables this exchange, but it requires the development of a standardized set of tags that every one agrees upon. These standardized sets of tags are often referred to as “schemas,” and without them there is no guarantee that different applications will recognize one another’s tags. As so often happens when standards are required, there are now competing standards developing that will be largely incompatible with

one another. Compatibility may be re-introduced through the development of “translators” or mappings between competing standards, but that is really putting a patch on a fundamentally flawed approach.

For XML to be as successful as it might be, there will have to be either industry consortia that can agree on standards for tagging data or there will have to be a few very powerful players who dictate standards to others in the industry, and who have the power to make those standards stick as defacto standards.

Soap

The Simple Object Access protocol (SOAP) is a way of using XML and http to contact objects on unlike systems and ask them to work together to solve a particular problem.

There are other protocols for interaction amongst unlike systems including COM, DCOM, and CORBA but SOAP is easier to implement across firewalls and may be better suited for lightweight applications.

Soap encapsulates data and instructions into an XML described envelope using standardized encoding rules and RPC conventions, and then transmits that envelope for system to system through http. SOAP is supported by a collection of companies that numbers IBM and Microsoft among the leaders.

• JavaScript

JavaScript was designed a scripting language to be used to allow interactivity within a browser. It was far less powerful than Java, but it was also far easier to use and implement. JavaScript’s could be written with simple text editors and were simply included as part of the HTML code. There was no need to compile to intermediate code, then download, and interpret that code at run time.

• ASP: Active Server Pages

Another way to personalize the web browsers experience is to provide a customized page for each browser. This requires that information be obtained from the user either through reading a cookie, tracking responses, or through asking for information. Then each page can be constructed especially for the user and delivered to that user alone.

Active Server Page technology enables this practice and is a part of most

commercial sites. Active server pages help allow the “mass customization” that can be an important part of the Internet experience.

Each user sees a page that was designed for her and her alone.

• Cookies

One of the most controversial and debated technologies of e-Business is the Cookie. The Cookie was invented by Netscape Communications to solve a problem that appeared to be a serious limitation of the World Wide Web and browsers that used HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP was originally designed to be a “stateless” protocol.”

That means that each transaction with a server or servers was independent. A server could not determine who you were, whether you had been there before, or what you had done previously. For e-Commerce, this is a severe limitation. Web retailers really wanted to have a way of preserving information about transactions from particular machines. Netscape invented and patented the cookie as a way to store such information on the users own computer.

• Application Service Providers

Application service providers provide application to users over the network. The concept is to rent an application rather than to buy it. Be careful here since ASP can refer either to Active Server Pages or Application service providers and they are very different things. It is only through the relentless advance of Moore’s Law and the Bandwidth law that we have arrived at a point where it might indeed be practical to download applications just in time as they are needed. This requires reliable network protocols, available bandwidth, and suitable technologies such as Java and XML to allow this to happen. Many think that the future of applications is renting rather than buying. One could look at this as the end of the old cycle of buy and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade or as the beginning of the era of continuous upgrades.

Connecting to the Net

Getting connected to the net offers many alternatives today. Among these are:

POTS -Plain Old Telephone Service (14.4, 28.8, 56K ->) ISDN 64 or 128 kbs

xDSL typically up to 1.5 Mbs

Cable Modems (Roadrunner etc.) typically up to 1.5 Mbs Satellite (One way: Direct PC; Two way: Gilat to Home) and Wireless 802.11(b) is 11 Mbs and cellular is presently restricted to quite slow rates.

POTS remains the most likely connection from homes, but offers only low bandwidth dial up connections. Those that want better bandwidth or

“always on” service usually turn to one of the other options.