Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

I was reading an article in Newsweek entitled "Not Made in Japan". The article detailed the challenges that the corporate, educational, and cultural structure(s) in Japan are facing when trying to compete in a world that is driven not by incremental improvement, but rather by innovative leaps. The article details the failure of DoCoMo to leverage it's leadership position in the Japanese market and in handset technology into the rest of the world and the loss of capitalization it has faced in this failure. It further discusses how Sony, originator of the Walkman, lost theMP3 market (even in Japan) to the Apple iPod through a lack of innovation in interfaces and design.

In reading the ...

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Last week Tony Rybczynski put up a blog on the Cisco Nexus switch entitled "The Nexus is no Lexus". Tony got a lot of comments, including a link that was from the Network World Cisco blog. This was responded to on the Network World Cisco blog by Doug Gourley of Cisco. In his response Doug states; "Certainly companies that have consistently failed to innovate and deliver in the networking segment, that have married their own R&D capabilities so tightly to the merchant silicon vendors that they have no capability for competitive differentiation."

Cisco is well known for a profound inability to innovate internally and a penchant for acquisition as ...

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I was asked to post a bit about my impressions of Dubai...so here is a posting on my visit. I wrote this on my way home, but other topics that were more time relevant came up so it sat for a while before I was able to publish it.

I spent a few days this week in Dubai, and came away impressed both with the frenetic level of activity as well as the challenges that they are facing. Dubai is growing from 2 to 6 million inhabitants over the next 4 years and they are building to accommodate the growth. In the Marina area where I was staying, there were about 20 towers, virtually every one under ...

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Flying from Raleigh to Dallas......

I spent a couple of days this week in Raleigh/Durham as part of an Enterprise Cabinet meeting and as part of that participated in a 2 hour visit to Hillside NT School to visit with their new class of High School freshmen. Hillsdale NT is a New Tech School funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a participant in the Nortel LearnIt program for project based learning. The Hillside NT is a new focus learning program within the Hillside High School in Durham that is intended to have 400 students. As this is the first year, the program has 100 9th graders in the program. ...

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I decided to wait a while before posting on this topic as there is so much noise on the topic. And I waited long enough that Yahoo turned down the first effort, but I thought a post was still appropriate as Microsoft seems to be undeterred in it's pursuit. Especially as this is the first in potentially multiple consolidations in the space.

I believe this is the logical transition of Microsoft from a "product" company into a services company. While Microsoft has continued to lead in the "product" space, it has not gained significant share in the "services" side of the business. As we all know, technologies and products tend to move down in value over ...

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I continue to be intrigued by the concept of virtual worlds and the ability of them to simulate/replace the physical environment. I find the concept of integrating virtual and real conference rooms (Sun has a demo of this) to be interesting. Much as a play is transformed when the actors "break" the 4th wall between them and the audience, this concept has the capability of radically changing both the virtual world (the play) and the real world (the audience). How could the unique relationship between the audience and Ferris Buehler have been achieved absent his initial dialog about; "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you ...

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From the UK

I spent the day at Leeds Met University. Leeds Met is the largest University in UK and was one of the first schools to join the Nortel Technology Solutions Academy(NTSA). Leeds Met have positioned the Nortel courseware and NCTS/NCTE Certifications as a mandatory element of the MSc degree in Mobile Computing & Distributed Networks.

I went to Leeds to meet with the faculty and students that are participating in the NTSA.   NTSA is a program that Nortel rolled out last year to work with universities worldwide to provide course curriculum and lab products to enable advanced education in communications as well as specific capabilities in configuring and managing Nortel products.

While there I ...

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