Telecom Asia writes:

Telecoms players see the emergence of converged, ubiquitous multiple access services as the key to future profitability, but getting there will take a mix of improved customer focus and good old-fashioned serendipity.

“Telcos are too focused on transmission – the answer to their prayers will be new business models that create value,” said Chang Bun Yoon, president and CEO of Hanaro Telecom during a Telecom Asia session on turning market demand into profit.

“The key to this will be convergence – voice, data, TV, wired and wireless broadband, all supported by all-IP backbones,” Yoon said. “Users will be able to communicate any time, anywhere with any device, from business-critical applications to entertainment.”

Keiji Tachikawa, a director and former president of NTT DoCoMo, sees a similar future trend, describing it as “a paradigm shift to an infrastructure that is indispensable to people in their daily activity.”

The shift is happening on three levels, he said: multimedia, ubiquitous use (not coverage, but things like using mobiles as a payment device), and globalization in which users can have access to the same service no matter where they are in the world.

The notion of convergence – in particular triple-play services accessible from multiple access methods from DSL and 3G to 802.16 – has been around the industry for years, but the roadmap to achieving it is less clear.

The New York Times writes:

A handful of missed deadlines and scrapped designs are hardly Intel's only worries. Assuming that the board promotes Mr. Otellini to the top spot, he will face the daunting task of reinventing Intel - a challenge that calls to mind the 1980's, when Mr. Grove turned the company, then an embattled memory chip pioneer under assault by aggressive Japanese competitors, into the world's dominant maker of microprocessors. Its chips run 80 percent of all PC's.

This time, though, Intel's main foe is not an external enemy, but a saturated PC market. The company has had plenty of warning: an Intel co-founder, Gordon E. Moore, anticipated decades ago that the power of computers would accelerate at an exponential pace. So each new generation of technological advance is a threat to the previous one, and no computer maker is safe from the trend.

Intel has overcome other market shifts in the past, and under Mr. Barrett, it has taken steps toward surviving in a post-PC world in which computing power has jumped into a myriad of hand-held gadgets for consumers, like cellphones, cameras and music players.

In other words, no longer is Intel's success assured so long as it efficiently stamps out ever faster processors. If it is to continue to prosper, Mr. Otellini must find a way to translate its power in the world of PC's into that of the high-end machines that run corporate data centers, while making deeper inroads into the new consumer markets.

I remember using Samuelson's textbook for an Economics course during my undergrad at IIT. So, was curious to see what he had to say. The New York Times talked to the 89-year-old Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

Mr. Samuelson asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives [to be published soon], [that the] the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs [is not true.]

In an interview last week, Mr. Samuelson said he wrote the article to "set the record straight" because "the mainstream defenses of globalization were much too simple a statement of the problem." Mr. Samuelson, who calls himself a "centrist Democrat," said his analysis did not come with a recipe of policy steps, and he emphasized that it was not meant as a justification for protectionist measures.

Up to now, he said, the gains to America have outweighed the losses from trade, but that outcome is not necessarily guaranteed in the future.

In his article, Mr. Samuelson begins by noting the unease many Americans feel about their jobs and wages these days, especially as the economies of China and India emerge on the strength of their low wages, increasingly skilled workers and rising technological prowess. "This is a hot issue now, and in the coming decade, it will not go away," he writes.

According to Mr. Samuelson, a low-wage nation that is rapidly improving its technology, like India or China, has the potential to change the terms of trade with America in fields like call-center services or computer programming in ways that reduce per-capita income in the United States. "The new labor-market-clearing real wage has been lowered by this version of dynamic fair free trade," Mr. Samuelson writes.

But doesn't purchasing cheaper call-center or programming services from abroad reduce input costs for various industries, delivering a net benefit to the economy? Not necessarily, Mr. Samuelson replied. To put things in simplified terms, he explained in the interview, "being able to purchase groceries 20 percent cheaper at Wal-Mart does not necessarily make up for the wage losses."

The global spread of lower-cost computing and Internet communications breaks down the old geographic boundaries between labor markets, he noted, and could accelerate the pressure on wages across large swaths of the service economy. "If you don't believe that changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the tooth fairy," Mr. Samuelson said.

ICE World (Business Std) has an interview with KB Chandrasekhar of Jamcracker:

There are three key trends in the market. First, software as service, price as a licence fee and a capital expenditure, is slowly turning into more of a revenue expenditure. Second, software was originally something monolithic.

In a mainframe, you had hardware and software together. Then slowly it got disintegrated into stacks and applications. But the stacks were also developed by the same companies like IBM who said they were so valuable.

Slowly you saw the emergence of the open source movement which said, if it is such a standardised component, why are people paying for it? Why don't people make use of the open source that makes it happen?

That is one of the reasons which is disrupting the whole industry today -- the migration towards Linux and associated components like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Python).

Third, the monolithic structure disintegrating into stacks has also triggered the emergence of web services which enables application integration painlessly. How is this new technology going to be embraced and extended? One needs a deep product architecture knowledge and being able to leverage that into not just engineering services but providing engineering lifecycle services.

That is, the customer begins to treat you as part of cost. Customers are increasingly looking at not just the technology edge, but somebody who can reliably, effectively and in a cost effective manner make your lifecycle his lifecycle and help him with the changing business model, not just the technology model.

Software is emerging as a service, on demand, as a subscription model. When I get value I pay; I pay only when I make money.

The eighties were driven by the core technology innovations of the Microsofts. The nineties were driven by netcentric innovations at the consumer level.

The early 21st century is driven by the delivery of services in a coordinated fashion coming from coordinated sources.

Atanu Dey writes about what we are working to enable as part of Emergic:

The internet is huge. It is bigger than one can imagine. We are fortunate that we have access to the internet. And I feel for those who do not have access to this astounding wealth of information and possible source of wonder, amazement, delight, instruction, and possibly enlightenment.

How do we bring down the barriers that prevent everyone from accessing the internet? Cost of access has to come down significantly from the present levels, and incomes have to go up. In other words, the internet has to become more affordable. Cost of access has two components from the point of view of the user. First, the user premises equipment. Currently, that happens to be the PC. While hardware prices are consistently coming down, they are still beyond the reach of a very large number of people. Besides, software is not all that cheap. Add to that the cost of managing a complex device like the PC, and the total cost of ownership is a pretty sum.

The second component of the cost of access to the internet is the connectivity cost. The trend is downward but not fast enough. For India, we need to have a rational broadband policy.

If we could somehow bring down the cost of the access device and the cost of broadband access, we can make the magic of the internet available to a much larger number. The former we can do by moving away from the PC paradigm. For the latter, we can only hope and pray that somehow good sense will triumph over the obstructionist instincts of the Indian policy makers.

Indra Sharma excerpts from a Business Standard editorial:

The percentage of people below the poverty line showed a drop from 35.4 per cent in 1993 to 26.4 per cent in 2000 -- a 9-percentage-point drop in seven years, or roughly 1.3 percentage points annually.

The literacy rate improved from 52 per cent in 1991 to 65 per cent in 2001 -- once again, at the rate of 1.3 per cent of the population every year.

Life expectancy improved by 0.7 years annually, moving from 58 in 1991 to 65 a decade later -- which actually works out to about 1.2 per cent on the base.

The average rate at which the key social indicators improve in the country works out to be slightly more than 1 percentage point each year.

India's human development index (put together by the UN Development Programme) has gone up by 0.323 points- from 0.254 to 0.577, in the 30 years to 2000, which makes it an annual improvement of almost 1.1 per cent of the potential maximum on the index.

India's rating of UNDP's Gender Development Index moves up from 0.250 to 0.563 between 1970 and 2000, which too makes it an annual improvement of fractionally more than 1 per cent of the potential maximum.

Interesting, this 1 per cent figure seems to hold fairly steady, irrespective of whether the economy is growing rapidly or slowly, whether it was the stagnant decade of the 1970s, or the more rapid period of the 1980s and 1990s.

It is the dream of every entrepreneur to build a company that is Built to Last. Yet, it is that rare exception of an enterprise that makes the transition from Good to Great. Like an unprotected fawn in the big and dangerous forest, a new business must navigate difficult and challenging terrain as it grows from its early days to maturity. One small mistake can sound the death-knell for the fledgling business. So, how can a business grow?

There are plenty of business books and entrepreneurial success stories which can provide insights into how interesting ideas became big hits. Like many of you, I too have read some of these. And I have a problem. Years later, these stories read like they were sanitised and glorified. Few capture the daily struggle that defines the life of most small and new businesses. Fewer still point a way forward in a world that needs to be navigated not with maps but with compasses.

I too face a similar challenge. For the past few years, I have shared some of my experiences and thinking (somewhat obliquely at times) through these columns and my weblog. It has been a long journey already as I have sought to build a roadmap for the future. Now, I face my next challenge. How do I assemble the various different parts of the puzzle as I seek to build out the Emergic vision and “reinvent computing” for the next billion users, who are primarily in the world's emerging markets.

Through a lot of thinking, erring and talking, I am trying to build a model for growth for my business. This week, I will share some of my experiences and learnings. This is just one chapter in a continuing story – which I hope to document on an ongoing basis. Hopefully, this will capture some of the struggles that an entrepreneur goes through and provide some insights in his mind.

Like every entrepreneur filled with optimism, I believe that I will succeed! But, I cannot ignore statistics that show that fewer than one in a hundred new ventures succeed. Worse than failure is a condition I call “the living dead.” If a business fails, at least one can start afresh. In the twilight zone between success and failure is where one sees little hope of significant success or growth, and at the same time all is not lost. One can continue in this state for a very long time, and slowly the zest and enthusiasm ebbs away. Each new day becomes like the previous one. This is a state that I dread to reach.

So, a lot of what I seek to do will entail risks. At the same time, each day that I come in to work, I seek to reduce the risk of failure. Even as one seeks to implement the long-term vision, one cannot ignore the short-term. There are many other such inherent contradictions as a new business grows.

In my case, we were about 30 people until a few months ago, primarily focused around offering Linux-based messaging and security solutions to Indian corporates. In parallel, I have been thinking for the past couple years on how to build an affordable computing ecosystem for emerging markets like India. Many ideas have come, we have done some work, and then withdrawn as things haven't quite shaped up the way I would have liked them to. Now, however, I believe the vision is in place. We are already up to 50 people, and seeking to grow. What does tomorrow hold for us? We are ready to compete for the future, and that's the growth challenge that I face and will describe in the next four parts of this series.

Tomorrow: Roadmap