Neo Leo

I had taken the Internet in its present form for granted, and since its widespread and ubiquitous usage nowadays, most of us take it for granted. The thought that would come foremost into us Netaholics, when we visualize the future of the Internet would be faster bandwidth, leading to more sophisticated applications wherein you would soon have your refrigerator, television & microwave hooked to internet ( I didn’t dream this up, Sony the last I heard has a range of home appliances which could connect to the internet). Given that picture who would dream of the Internet being broken down, a.k.a Balkanization.

Never did I think of it as a possibility until I stumbled on a link on BBC which said “Warning over ‘broken up’ Internet”. The first line of the article read “Nitin Desai, chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), set up by the UN, warned that concerns over the net's future could lead to separation.” It seems like there are host of issues, which Nitin Desai mentions which I highlight here
• The Internet in five years would have more users in Asia than in Europe or America
• There would soon be more web pages in Chinese than there are in English
• The types of use for the internet in India & China are public service applications, unlike commerce & media
applications in the western world. The implications are that different applications need different levels of
security, which is not possible right now.
• There are also issues about domain names in English; the Chinese apparently might set up domain names in
Chinese.

Issues, real issues that I think if not overcome may become an obstacle for the next generation of Web Applications. I hope things do not come to such a stage, lest I might not be able to connect to my refrigerator in Beijing, to check if Mar’s bars are to be restocked while buying them in the US. :)

Posted by dsmaratt at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chaos, the Greek goddess of confusion, according to Greek mythology, gave birth to the universe and all the other titian gods. Looking at the present now, it is interesting to note a chaotic 21st century world, which is so characteristic of its Creator. Maybe the ultimate aim of evolution of the universe is the transition from its initial simple form to a mothball of pandemonium where chaos is all pervasive.

My curiosity over this word (Chaos) and a realization of how widespread it’s tentacles were, were made apparent when I came upon Tom Peter’s “Thriving on Chaos”. Constant Change (an oxymoron in itself) brings about chaos and to flourish on it, we need to keep redefining everything is the gist of what Tom Peters has to say. It reminded me of the Chaos Theory which explains phenomena like how if a butterfly in the northern hemisphere, changes the number of times it flutters it’s wings has an effect on if a tornado can occur in the southern hemisphere.

Change or die is the mantra for today’s business world and if we look around, we see real world examples. Bill Ford, former CEO of Ford Motor has stated in an email to all employees that their business model has to change to sustain profitability. Google is designed to operate by Chaos and implementing chaos into its structure is why Google ($10 billion) is a tremendous success. “Chaos equals risk and opportunity” is what George Moakley, IT Strategic Planning; Intel has to say on how companies find new opportunities.

Adapting to change is essential for survival for any business and the slower it is that it accepts change, the faster it is becomes obsolete. A changing world is a chaotic world and since change is constant, so is chaos. To survive on chaos, we need to adapt to change, but to thrive on chaos we need to introduce change. Entities that lead change are the leaders of this century and may this 21st class of CICS in this 21st century be full of them.

Posted by dsmaratt at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)