I am a PC...

I have made a life making PCs, Repairing PCs, Selling PCs, Teaching PCs, Developing Applications for PCs, Selling Software that run on PCs, Architecting Solutions for PCs, Partnering to Businesses that make money out of Services on PC for the past 2o years.

Couldn’t agree more with this “I am a PC” campaign.

However, keep in mind, this is the era of mobile, ultra mobile, compact and ultra compact PCs…

and for many, it is called “Mobile Phone!!!”…

Service + (of) Services

The more I read thought leaders like “Tom Peters” and the more about business models, two concepts are standing very clear. 1. Scale, scale and scale… 2. Niche, niche and niche…

Scale gives you price arbitration and niche gives you value arbitration. The strange thing is they rarely co-exist.

Every great business starts with catering a niche market and its profits /growth rate will be very high. But as the business scales, focus turns to revenue pressure, profitability and the most important item...stock price. They tend to spread their wings to achieve all these and do everything within their limit to get there.

It’s the same with Software Services Business Model. We have services for everything from search, news, photos, videos, music, files, news, content, storage, computing power, and applications like CRM, Accounting, etc. These services are becoming bigger and bigger… and eventually the will become commodity.

So, how do you deliver value with services?

Let me share with you some niche services business that are simply “Service of Services”, a very valuable proposition.

www.framechannel.com

You get your account on FrameChannel and pickup content from over 400 channel feeds like news, weather, sports, finance etc. You also configure framechannel with your account details on facebook, flickr and picassa etc.

Congratulations….You have just configured a service of Services!!! YES, framechannel, makes your customized content as a service!!!

You go pickup a wireless photo frame and configure it with framechannel credentials. Bingo… your customized content is now displayed on the digital photo frame.

Think about this... You are on an international trip and upload pictures to Google Picasa / Facebook or any picture sharing service. Instantly your family back home is able to see them on the photo frame in your living room!!!

In fact, it need not be a photo frame, it can even be an application like a screen saver or a gadget that connects to framechannel service!!!

Now, I call this a "Service of Services" as it aggregates various sources of information form discrete services, delivers a customized content to wherever /whenever you want... A true value.

Could Google or Microsoft do it? Probably NOT. They will surely integrate their own assets into a single service.

Will they inter-operate? Probably NOT. or it may take ages...Take for example, Yahoo and Live Messenger integration.

But, a nimble, smart bunch of kids can pull this off without any "Big Brother" attitude and "clash of strategic priorities".

Also make a note, consumers want choice, they will never stick with one single platform or a single service...

If you are thinking of a startup, or some new idea, go figure if you could come up with a niche “Service of Services”

Innovation in "Services + Hardware" has just begun...

Last week, I dusted out a digital photo frame that was awarded to me two years back while at Microsoft by “TSP Academy”, a distance learning program designed for “peer-to-peer” coaching & learning for Microsoft's field technology professionals.

It is a 5” LCD photo frame that had multiple memory slots and an inbuilt speaker for playing music while displaying the pictures. While setting it up, I started thinking about few “Wouldn’t it be great if…” scenarios.

I could immediately think of USB interface instead a memory slot so that I could store hundreds of pictures on a memory stick or external hard disk and/or even better a 802.11 wireless feature that would allow me to directly stream pictures / video and audio from home PC storage.

During my nomadic search on the net, I stumbled upon two new models of photo frame by Samsung and Sony just released last week with some interesting features.

Let’s take Samsung first

Internet Photo Frame SPF-85V is an 8-inch, WiFi-enabled device for an estimated street price of $199.99.

It had all typical features of photo frame with USB 2.0 interface. Interestingly this device is optimized for use with Microsoft’s Windows Live Space for easy photo streaming.

Additionally, it also came with Samsung’s InfoLink feature, which offers the ability to receive RSS feeds from “USA Today” and www.framechannel.com. This device could also work as a second monitor using Samsung’s UbiSync Technology that uses only USB Cable!

Looking at Sony,

SONY VAIO Wi-Fi Photo Frame comes with a 7”5, 800x480 screen. It can locate and playback all the photos from your PC, display from memory cards or directly from the built-in 128MB internal storage.

Again the interesting feature is displaying pictures from Google's  Picasaweb albums!

It is indeed interesting that we are starting to see emergence of consumer device from hardware vendor that leverage services from a different software vendor.

Just Visualize, videos from Youtube, Music from iTunes, RSS feeds from your own favorite news site, your calendar, your blog or any service out in the cloud streamed into your photo frame!!!

Let me extend my imagination a little bit…

How nice would it be to have similar USB port and wireless network chips embedded on our TV sets, converting them into large photo frames?

An era of innovation in "Services + Hardware" has just begun...

Browser may be the "Platform of the Future"

Today, Google released Google Chrome, a web browser!!! It assumes very significance from the very fact that the download link is right on "Google Home Page" which never happened to any of their product releases.

As I started analyzing things, few things stand out…

Open Source – This is a fork of Webkit , an open source project. By this Google straight away wins the hearts and minds of open source lovers all over the world, making adoption of this browser viral. Google will never look “Evil” at least the time being, Privacy groups will never be able to complain as anyone could review and scrutinize.

Faster – Early tests reveal that it is faster that Firefox and IE in rendering web pages; a reason for many users to switch to Chrome.

V8 Javascript virtual machine – This java scripting engine is 3 times faster in executing scripts. This gives them enormous power to deliver productivity applications like Google docs better and better. Google’s assets will be tuned run faster on this browser increasing adoption of Chrome

Anonymous browsing – If Microsoft announced “Privacy mode” in IE8, Chrome got this anonymous browsing.

Tabs - Tabs are located on top of the window and not under the url bar. This makes the Tabs central part of user experience and tabs can me moved around by “tearing off”! !!

Tabs (Technical) – This is one feature that made me look closer. Each Tab is a process, which means these are isolated, safer and I can kill any rouge application just by closing the tab. There is a “task manager” to see the stats like memory consumption, etc for each tab.

Search interface – It is definitely intuitive; you do not have a separate text box for search.

Availability: Chrome is available for Windows first, then Mac and finally on Linux. This very clearly shows whom Google is going after.

Automatic updates – As per user license agreement, Chrome will be updated by Google, which means, expect new additional features and any security holes plugged slowly on to the browser.

There are already mixed reviews from the pres. Some are rating Chrome just below Firefox and above IE. On the other hand, some are skeptical as there is nothing compelling for a seasoned user of IE or Firefox.

Let me guess the long term impacts of this Chrome release.

Google will release Silverlight / Flash Equivalent: Given that the web bandwidth is increasing and becoming cheaper, users no longer look for simplicity; users need experience. Flash/Silverlight equivalent is the only way Google will be able to deliver rich user experience. Google Docs is a classical example where user experience is utmost important. Looking at V8, this is inevitable in the long run.

Chrome adoption will be in pockets and grow slowly: Google followers, open source developers, and geeks will embrace Chrome immediately. Hardware vendors may offer Chrome as another choice. Unless Google releases few “cool” features, like how Apple revolutionized portable music and phone users, adoption could be slow and limited to these pockets.

Google becoming a complete software platform provider: Google is already proven in services platform, now getting into software platform by way of Chrome browser platform and android Mobile OS platform.

Google may deliver services and software on their own hardware Platform – From Services to Software to hardware; that’s the way I see. Experience and stickiness can happen only with consumer experience. Extreme experience can happen only when “Services + Software + hardware” are under one hood like Apple products and gaming consoles like X-Box / PlayStation.

More and more, we are spending our time using browser in our everyday life. The paintbrush, calculator, control panel and everything else is becoming trivial things. Browser plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s SilverLight deliver a more visually appealing experience on the browser.

I am not predicting about special users like developers, animators, designers and large servers that run in datacenters, but when it comes to computing need for normal consumers, choice of operating system will become insignificant decision factor and experience & perceived value will be the norms. We are already seeing such behaviors on Mobile, Apple and Nintendo buying trends.

To me, it looks like “Browser may be just the Experience Platform of the future”