Imagination and Innovation

Imagination and Innovation

A post on the FB page of my friend took me to this link on the techcrunch story of Apple and how its net worth is today more than that of Microsoft, HP and Dell combined. It sort of sounds unbelievable that the market cap of Apple today is close to $ 300 billion compared to $ 200 billion for Microsoft, $ 72 billion for HP and $ 30 billion for Dell. See this in the backdrop of a market cap of $ 400 billion of Microsoft ten years back when Apple was at $ 8 billion!

Last 10 years have been amazing for Apple. It has led the world with its imaginative and innovative products. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to “rescue” Apple, it had a market cap of just about $ 3 billion. For investors it has been a windfall. The apple stock has zoomed from about $ 5 then to about $ 326 now!! It’s a mind boggling growth story. How did this happen.
Over the last few years, Apple has launched 6 innovations that have proved to be game changers. These include the iPod, the mp3 player that began the decade of disruptive technologies. This was followed by the iTunes which allowed people to buy the music they like. Next was the iPhone, which remains the leader inspite of attempts by rival companies to come up with matching products. The AppExchange has applications for almost everything. Most of us might use only the free apps, but the kind of applications available are truly amazing. The Apple Store is another innovative way of marketing products and more than $ 2 billion worth of products have been sold through these stores. The iPad revolution has been another game changer disruptive technology which might prove to the end of the road for laptops and desktops.

When we look at Apple’s innovation model, it is apparent that it is not they just make beautiful products that work. It also integrates it with a complete business model. The example is integration of iTunes and AppExchange with the iPods, iPhones and the iPads. The approach of Apple to build platforms and hosting applications on a cloud is the way to go. It allows users to plug and play. It makes technology simple to use. Today 5 year olds can use an iPod and an iPad more easily than the XO laptop, designed by OLPC for kids!

The iCloud which has been announced by Apple will do what iTunes did to music. It should become easy to store and share pictures and documents. The ease of use and the convenient interface that Apple devices provide is unmatchable. I am sure in the next 10 years, tech companies will have to innovate if they have to match up to Apple’s story. Today the difference is market cap of Apple and Microsoft is $ 100 billion which is more than the combined worth of RIM, Nokia, eBay and Netflix or that of Amazon and Adobe combined!

Lets see how the game changes in the next 12 months. These are interesting times.

Service Parody

May like to see the parody of Robert Frost's ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’. It is in HT in Khushwant Singh's column today and makes good reading.

Whose jobs are these, don't want to know
Paid heavily each month without fail though;
Boss hasn't time for looking here,
To see on the files the dust grow.
My ballpoint pen may think it queer,
To start without an envelope near;
Between the nods and a handshake
The file progresses in minutes mere.
Boss gives his head a vigorous shake
To ask if there is any mistake;
Some part of my earnings he does reap,
We all have and eat our cake.
The chair is cosy and files in heap
But I have a family to keep;
And hours to sleep before the nation's leap
And hours to sleep before the nation's leap.

(courtsey : Ashutosh Jindal)

Government 2.0

Government 2.0 Trends

Last week I was invited to be a panel on Government 2.0 and what it means in the Indian context. Government 2.0 has become one of the new buzz words specially with the Web 2.0 tools becoming ever popular in way ICT dominates lives of people. When you interact with different people, as was even the case with the panelists, you find that people associate different things with Government 2.0. This is also in line with the changing paradigm of Government and Governance itself. Governments today are becoming more connected and open. From an objective of delivering public services to citizens the goal today is more on improving efficiency and effectiveness with a focus on outcomes. With the greater use of Public Private Partnerships for Government projects, increasingly there is more synergy between the Public and the Private Goals. There is a transformation happening in the way Government engages citizens also. From a scenario, where the prime focus was on delivering services to citizens and making information available to citizens through portal and RTI, the shift now is engaging citizens proactively in the process of policy formulation.

Such a shift in Government’s role is part of the global trends of Governments using citizens knowledge, expertise and ideas to ensure that the right policies are formulated and all concerns are addressed. The role of engaging citizens in oversight and accountability is becoming overarching. Web 2.0 tools are enabling Governments to benefits from getting information promptly and taking the right action. In San Francisco, the City Hall can get an instant report on an overheated train car from a citizen through an application called SeeClickFlix. Cities across the world are releasing more and public information to the web and mobile application developers are creating “mash up” applications to make it easy to use. This has a great potential in ushering a new era of grasssroots democracy. This has led to redefining the role of a citizen in a Gov 2.0 world. It offers a way to bring in true participative democracy with the citizens having a say in how their tax money is being spent. In Washington, the DC 311 i Phone application allows users to take photos of graffiti, potholes, etc., and send them to a city database that straightaway sends teams for the various work requests. The photos are linked to a GPS location so that officials as well as other citizens can see the problem. The potential of such an application with regard to non functional signal lights, missing manhole covers, overflowing garbage bins in our country is immense. It can really enable municipal corporations to focus more on rectifying the faults rather than finding the faults.

However, the role of a citizen in today’s world can be more than a mere fault finder. There has to be a more positive and constructive way to engage the citizens rather than just conducting oversight. The citizens can be involved more in dialogue with the Government that ensures participation of citizens in policy formulation. The recent debate on BT Brinjal or the MNIK controversy demonstrated how forums like Twitter can express public opinion effectively. This is part of the global trends like the Obama Open Government initiative which is engaging citizens around issues like transparency and collaboration.

Government 2.0 can help citizens be better informed about issues. This is where citizens can gain a broader understanding of the implications and tradeoffs in making big decisions, or even local decisions. Involving citizens through Web 2.0 tools can also help in providing ideas and solutions. People with different perspectives can solve problems at times better than even experts. The concept of crowd-sourcing is becoming increasingly popular. This is where a problem is sent out to a group of people asking for contributions or possible solutions to a problem.

In essence, the way to bring about the concept of Government 2.0 is by following a step by step approach. To begin with government employees and elected officials at all levels need to be allowed to access and use social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks to connect with their constituents. Subsequently government agencies need to use social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks strategically to achieve their objectives and solicit citizen feedback to improve their processes. This would also enable creation of a participatory platform that engages citizens in policy debates and voluntary service at all levels of the government. As these systems mature, all non-sensitive and non-personal government data can be made openly available so that citizens can use it and third parties can build Web 2.0 mash-ups on top of it. Ultimately, a stage can come where Government agencies can use crowd-sourcing by institutionalizing a process that directly uses the aforementioned participatory platform as an important input into government functions, including policy formation.