Showing posts with label iTunes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iTunes. Show all posts

October 8, 2011

Thank You Steve Jobs


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August 15, 2010

Engineering An Integrated IT Solution

Traditionally, the IT market has been deeply fragmented with numerous vendors offering countless of products and IT leaders have been left holding the proverbial bag of varied and mixed technologies to interoperate, integrate, optimize, and solve complex organizational problems with.

While competition is a great thing in driving innovation, service, and cost efficiencies, the results of the current fragmented IT market has been that organizations buy value or best of breed technologies from across the vendor universe, only to find that they cannot make them work with their other IT investments and infrastructure.

The result has been a contribution to IT execution that has become notorious for delivering an 82% project failure rate as reported by the Standish group.

Typically, what follows numerous attempts to resuscitate a code blue IT project is the eventual abandonment of the investment, only to be followed, by the purchase of a new one, with hopes of doing it “right” the next time. However, based on historical trends, there is a 4 out of 5 chance, we run into the same project integration issues again and again.

Oracle and other IT vendors are promoting an integration strategy to address this.

Overall, Oracle’s integration strategy is that organizations are envisioned to “buy the complete IT stack” and standup “engineered systems” more quickly and save money than if they have to purchase individual components and start trying to integrate them themselves. Some examples of this are their Exadata Storage Servers and Fusion Applications.

Oracle is not the first company to try this integration/bundling approach and in fact, many companies have succeeded by simplifying the consumers experience such as Apple bringing together iTunes software with the iPod/iPad/Mac hardware or more generally the creation of the smartphone with the integration of phone, web, email, business productivity apps, GPS, games, and more. Similarly, Google is working on its own integration strategy of business and personal application utilities from Google Docs to Google Me.

Of course, the key is to provide a sophisticated-level of integration, simplifying and enhancing the end-user experience, without becoming more generally anticompetitive.

On the other hand, not all companies with integration strategies and product offerings are successful. Some are more hype than reality and are used to drive sales rather than actually deliver on the integration promise. In other words, just having an integration strategy does not integration make.

For the IT leader, choosing best of breed or best of suite is not an easy choice. We want to increase capabilities to our organizations, and we need a solutions strategy that will deliver for our end users now.

While an integration strategy by individual companies can be attractive to simplify our execution of the projects, in the longer-term, cloud computing offers an alternative model, whereby we attach to infrastructure and services outside of our own domains on a flexible, as needed basis and where in theory at least, we do not need to make traditional IT investment on this scale at all anymore.

In the end, a lot of this discussion comes down to security and trust in the solution/vendor and the ability to meet our mission needs cost-effectively without a lot of tinkering to try to put the disparate pieces together.


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November 19, 2007

iPod Versus Zune and Enterprise Architecture

Zune has been playing catch up with iPod in the music player business, but from an User-centric enterprise architecture standpoint, they’ve got it all wrong!

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 14 November 2007 reports that Microsoft has retooled the Zune so that it “marks a vast improvement; however, it’s still no iPod.”

Where is Microsoft going wrong?
  1. An inferior product—“last year when Microsoft Corp. introduced its Zune music player to take on Apple’s iPod juggernaut, the software giant struck out. While the Zune had a good user interface, it was bigger and boxier, with clumsier controls, weaker battery life, and more complex software. Its companion online music store has a much smaller catalogue, a more complicated purchase process, and no videos for sale. And the Zune’s most innovative feature, built-in Wi-Fi networking, was nearly useless.” So much for competing on product quality!
  2. Underestimating the competition—Microsoft is “back with a second improved round of Zune’s…Apple hasn’t been standing still…the 80-gigabyte Classic, which costs the same as 80-gigabyte Zune, is slimmer than the Zune and has a flashy new interface, if a smaller screen. And the eight-gigabyte nano, which costs the same as the eight-gigabyte Zunem now plays videos and is much smaller—yet it has a larger screen. In addition, Apple has spiffed up its iTunes software…and Apple still trounces Microsoft in the selection of media it sells…more than six million songs, about double what the Zune marketplace offers, and dwarfs Microsoft’s selection of Podcasts and music videos as well.”

The WSJ concludes, “Microsoft has greatly improved the Zune hardware and software this time. But it seems to be competing with Apple’s last efforts, not its newest ones.”

In spite of these explanations, I think we’re missing something else here. If you compare the Microsoft desktop software to Apple’s, Microsoft also has a worse product, yet is the hands-down market leader. So why is Microsoft struggling with Zune?

Maybe functionality is part of the equation, but not the whole thing. It’s interesting to me that neither the article nor advertisements I see for Zune address anything about the interoperability of the product with Apple’s iTunes. Interoperability is not only a major enterprise architecture issue, but from a consumer standpoint, do you really expect people to dump their investment in their iTunes music library when they buy a Zune?

Looking at Yahoo Answers online, I see consumers share this concern:

“Can you use the iTunes’ software with the Microsoft Zune? I am torn between which to buy, if you can use itunes with the Zune then that’s the one I’ll get, but if you can’t then I’m getting an iPod, help me decide please.”

“Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

No you cannot. iTunes only works with the iPod, Zune is a completly different player made by Microsoft, it has its own music program and marketplace called the Zune Marketplace. The Zune Software can automatically copy songs that have not been purchased from iTunes (because ones that are have copy protection on them) and put them in the Zune Program.”

Until Microsoft acts as the architects par excellence that they are, and work out the all-important EA interoperability issues of its product, and communicates this with its customers, the Zune will continue to be second-rate, functionality notwithstanding.
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