Japan EMBA - Management of IT

Several European cell phone companies have blocked Skype or imposed special charges for Skype use.  Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype may change this.  Here’s an article from the New York Times discussing the issues . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/technology/06skype.html

Recall the discussion in class about music distribution and Rhapsody.

Steve Jobs announced the iCloud, a service which stores music, documents, as well as other media, and makes them available to a user’s PCs and other devices.

According to Jobs  . . . “We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”  . . .   “Everything happens automatically, and there is nothing new to learn,”

Here’s a link to an article in the New York Times/International Herald Tribune.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/technology/07apple.html?scp=1&sq=apple%20cloud&st=cse

Curtis Carlson was quoted by Tom Friedman in the New York Times last week —.   Via Wikipedia:  “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate.

What does this mean to the leaders of traditional corporations and to politicians?  What value can a traditional organization add to bottom up innovation?

Curtis Carlson is the CEO of SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute).

Last week we discussed the Bank of Tokyo – Mitsubishi UFJ ATM problem in 2008 which was related to the integration of systems following a merger.   Seven Bank’s ATMs were expecting a Katakana character but were sent a Kanji character.   As a result many ATMs were shut down.  You can find the article at http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/145754/atm_glitch_hits_systems_integration_at_major_japanese_bank.html

In the following article, Earl Steven Raymond discusses open source development and why it can produce reliable software.   He discusses traditional hierarchical “cathedral”  development models vs. the “bazaar” model where users are part of the development community.  Quotable (from the article):  “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

If you have time, I suggest you read the article and post your comments below.   (Remember you need to log on to this site to post a comment.)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/index.html

(The article was suggested by Professor Steven Johnson, of Temple’s MIS Department.)