The concept of time in Enterprise Solutions

Time is an interesting concept in typical enterprise solutions. Most transactional systems think of time as transaction date for an event. In context of business entities, time is modeled as the date of birth and date of dying/ retirement of a particular entity. People did not have a good way to interact with time. However, the web based stock charting systems are giving users a better way to see time. Users can see stock price variations for a day or a month. These variations can exist as the business entities morph from one legal entity to another or as the scale itself changes due to stock splits and mergers.

Architecture Strategy for Nokia

Will Nokia touch its original price?

Nokia's stock price is behaving wierdly. Market analysts predict that it will touch $24. Current stock price has fallen to $10. As a follower of this company, one wonders, what is the realistic outlook for this company and where does it need to improve from a software architecture perspective?

Nokia is the world's largest cellphone company. It releases mutiple models each year and sells millions of cellphones around the world in different markets.

However, off late it has been losing marketshare to more innovative competitors like Google and Apple. Google has launched its own version of the phone OS Android and Apple has built an eco-system of apps and music around its phone. Apple has already defined iself as a product design company and iPhone and the new iPad are no different.

Nokia on the other hand excels in making reliable cellphone handsets. Nokia should ideally now segment the market and decide which segments it focuses on.

From, the looks of it, Nokia segments its market as follows:
1. The mobile phone user
2. The Email user
3. Music lover
4. The Photo Buff
5. The Mobile Computer.

With each of the above, Nokia needs to think which way it sees the market go. Nokia can still play the role of the ideal converged device by offering something that comes close to the real and perceived needs of the customer. However, iPhone and Android sets a new baseline for the phones of the future in terms of a platform that others can build content for.

It is this partner ecosystem that Nokia needs more than hardware design. A platform that is open and not exclusive to certain channel partners. With a differentiated product line, Nokia will need to make sure that others can treat the Nokia hardware platforms that they themselves can provide differentiated products for. Nokia will also need to ensure that it allows networks and channel partners to package this variability as a differentiated product.

One of the likely problems has been that even though Nokia has very differentiated hardware platform, its operating system is antiquated and not highly differentiated. While differentiation exists at level of Series 40, 60 and so on, it is geared towards hardware capabilities rather than consumer segments. Maybe Nokia needs to think of an OS and SDK strategy that is built for gamers, music lovers, imaging enthusiasts and so on. Maemo would be an ideal foundation to start building that second tier SDK.

The Next Wave of Innovation

It is now becoming clear to me that the winners in technology innovation will not be the companies who build the technology but the companies that use the technology effectively. The last decade has seen a proliferation of technologies to consumers around the world.

A lot of things a normal person would attach themselves to have been digitized. To name a few,...

1. Books
2. Music
3. Entertainment
4. News
5. Vacation (planning) - may be in future people will take virtual vacations
6. Writing letters
7. Movies

What does it mean? It means that winners in each of these areas will be companies that completely restructure the economics of creating and consuming these virtual content.