Once the leader in the Smartphone operating system developers, Microsoft has currently a penetration lower than 5% in the smartphone market towards the end of 2011, currently ruled by Android. Android now has a third of the global market share  (33%). RIM’s share has plummeted to 29%. Apple is barely holding at 25% and Palm, which is barely worth mentioning anymore, fell another point to 2.8%.

Microsoft is targeting to gain considerable market-share upto 10% for the time being and slowly regain its otherwise lost competitive advantage. By collaborating with HTC (Radar), Samsung and Nokia, Microsoft is targeting a mass market where it can reach out to its potential customers.

A question that may worry many technocrat is that with all the added GUI that microsoft has pumped into the Mango phones (Windows 7 and Windows 7.5), how will the added power consumption be handled by the high end processors added to these really smart phones (1 GHz processors are the norm now). Smartphone users are often plagued by the battery support that forces them to recharge their phones every alternate day or even everyday, if one talks for 4-5 hours. While, due to this very specific need, smartphones from Blackberry (RIM) and Nokia Symbian Smartphones are still in the market, its time to realize that business users of smartphone often value these hard performance factors over GUI improvements.

Another major area of focus is connectivity, especially over web. Most of these smartphone sucker out while being connected over 3G. If you are online, in most phones, if not all, you are likely to need to recharge your phone everyday, and effectively after a year, your battery starts showing signs of stress. I personally sometimes miss those days when I could charge my mobile once a week and that would satisfy all the phone-calls I needed to make. While I thrive on the web, it has its costs too.

With other features in the mobile market going for a rat race (like cameras, internal memory, etc), a major decision point in the purchasing behavior may be these factors. Also another decision factor may be the accessibility to services and distribution channels, something which Microsoft is targeting in a very focused manner by collaborating with Nokia, which has one of the most extensive servicing and distribution channels.

While in the days of cloud computing, what everyone else is using is also adding drastically to the experience of using a smartphone, it is necessary to understand that jumping into the smartphone bandwagon should be a decision taken more judiciously for every user, based on a smart analysis of one’s actual needs.

It remains to be seen who will win this fight for market-share in the operating systems market. It indeed is getting intensely competitive. Will Microsoft be able to turn over its bad times with this Windows 7 series? Only time will say. What do you think?

Information Systems (IS) is a discipline bridging the business field and the well-defined computer science field (popularly called information technology) that has been evolving since it was coined in the early 1970s.An information systems discipline therefore is supported by the theoretical foundations of management social science, information theories and information technology such that students of the discipline have unique opportunity to explore the academics of various business models as well as related algorithmic processes within a computer science discipline. Typically, information systems include people, business procedures or processes, data, software, and hardware that are used to gather and analyze digital information. Specifically Information Systems are the intersection that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create, & distribute data (computing) through its business processes, and implemented by its human capital.

While Information Technology (IT) typically is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of digitized information, often represented technically as “Data” through electronics-based media built upon the disciplines of computing and telecommunications. The terminology was first coined in a 1958 by Leavitt and Whisler who defined it as “the new technology that does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology.” Essentially, in its raw form, it comprises of Hardware, Software, the platforms to support both, communication networks and protocols.

It is crucial to understand that while “Information Technology” is a huge discipline with an identity of its own, it essentially is a subset of the discipline “Information Systems”, although the latter evolved much later. The discipline of Information Systems specifically studies the intersection of Business Processes (which may or may not be technology enabled), People (who will be part of the business processes and will use information technology) and Information Technology.

Hope this clarifies your thoughts. Do let me know what you think or would like to discuss further,

In theory, organizations should recognize the value of systematic reuse of internal assets and reward internal reuse efforts. In practice, many factors act as barriers to success in technology reuse. Software reuse often fails for the following reasons:

• Organizational impediments: In house developing of software systematically, to create reusable software assets requires a deep understanding of application developer needs and business requirements. As the organization size grows, coordination problems are often a major challenge.
• Business need impediments: Similar business units within the same organization often have different needs which are not always apparent. Trying to force fit the same solution to different problems is a sure recipe for chaos.
• Economic impediments: Supporting the development of reusable technology requires an economic investment, and often IT teams operate as cost-centers and thus their priorities are ignored.
• Administrative impediments: It is hard to document reusable technology properly for usage across multiple business units within large organizations, although the same may be reusable in the smaller business units. Hence business units may end
• Political impediments: The teams that develop reusable technology are often viewed with suspicion by the rest of the technology team, as they may no longer be empowered to make key architectural decisions. In group rivalry is also a major barrier to the development of reusable technology.
• Psychological impediments: Application developers often feel “top down” reuse efforts as an indication that management lacks confidence in their technical abilities and an insult to their capabilities.

HP has a very strong distribution channel globally, and this was something Palm was lacking, while it strived to compete with the movers and shakers in the industry, although it was amongst the first innovators of the PDA. While this gives the exciting opportunity to leverage Palm’s not so visible yet hgh quality phones through HP’s network, the core of HP can focus its internal R&D to what it does best, i.e. focus on the laptops, printers, scanners, work stations and servers. This again will mean an organizational restructuring may be on its way, surely for Palm, and possibly also for HP research.

So this may be a good time for the bigger players in the palmtop computing industry to do a SWOT analysis and rethink their strategy. With HP pushing Palm and given the parent company’s deep pockets (being one of the biggest technology company by far), we may be witnessing an interesting change of powerplay in this industry.

What do you think?

Since IT products are  intangible, it has been recognized that the best price for intangible products should never be determined by production costs. Cost can be the “floor” of pricing alternatives and the customer’s quantified benefit in monetary terms should be the “ceiling.” The best price lies somewhere in between and that should be based upon the value of the technology to the customer.

This pricing can be done in the following steps:

1. Decide the various unique benefits from your product, such that there is no overlap.
2. Quantify the objective of deliverables for each benefit, by discussing the same with your client.
3. Map each benefit to its monetary value from the client’s data (or industry average).
4. Ask the client how much percentage deviation is acceptable from the quantified objective of deliverables mentioned earlier.
5. Discount the monetary value of each objective with the deviation percentage.
6. Sum up the discounted benefits.
7. Discount that sum by the operating profit margin of your client, and quote the calculated price.

The major point of debate for any firm, when it decides to go for an investment, is what would be the return on its investment, as the ROI figures are what often drive investment decisions. This methodology helps the client deduct the exact ROI from his investment.

Read the linked paper to know more about how you can implement value based pricing.

Did you read our article on the various pricing strategies used to price information technology products and service engagements?