Dictators and Social Networks

Not even in their dreams the dictators in the middle eastern countries would have expected these kind of uprising from the youth of their countries. The countries are ablaze , the squares of country Capital's are abuzz with angry people and the state of anarchy which dictators have carefully preserved over the decades are crumbling in front of their own eyes.

The winds of change , which almost became a bit of gaffe thanks to obama's alleged overuse, are sweeping fast and so fast that mountains of resolute are uprooted.

So what caused these uprising and why Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain are all burning?

There are multiple reasons to this:

The first being the order of the world is changing. The Western democracies which traditionally fed these dictators in the name of arresting the arise of islamic fundementalism are mired with their own economic issues.

Secondly these countries have huge youth population who are not included in the weatlh enjoyed the top honchos of their country and needless to say they are very angry about that.

Lastly, the advancement of technology ,especially the social networking, has made the collaboration between the angry youth incredibly easy. All that it takes is to create a group in Facebook to share your frustration , organize your even and zooom there is a social uprising in notime. 

The dictators who have been very comfortable arresting the earlier uprisings with a combination of strict policing, tightly controlled media and brutal forces are caught unaware now. The key definition of what they are trying to control has changed significantly thanks to the non traditional media. The resistance and uprising of the angry youth, which has been crushed successfully so far, has non traditional letouts like facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr etc.

When there are easy letouts for your emotions, you start expressing more freely. When you start expressing more freely and more often, you tend to ignite the fire.

It would be an exaggeration to state that the soc networking site are the orign of these unrest, but we cannot disagree on their level of contribution in igniting, fueling and sustaining the momentum. The well preserved forests of arrogance, callosal absurdities and oppression have been set ablaze by the tech savvy angry youth.The interesting thing is that the forest is quite big and the areas of China, North Korea, Iran etc are still withstanding.....

We are very sorry Mr Dictator: all that it takes to initiate an uprising against you are a bunch of tech savvy youth with facebook, twitter etc accounts. Get your acts right or you would very soon have people rewriting your legacy [they would capture that in wikipedia as well].

Btw, lets all thank Mark Zuckerberg and others for contributing so much for a big cause , though their original intent was just do make some ad-money!!!!

Key Technology Trends for 2011

All of the technorati have published their take on what would be key technology trends for 2011 a month back. I did an analysis of all the key trends and found out most of them are same as the last year or minor derivatives of the same. Sometimes it feels like Time is circular than linear and progressive. Anyhow, here is my attempt to do it with a difference!

From a Macro trend perpsective; SOA, BPM, BI , Mobile, Cloud still remain the hot favorites with SOA increasingly becoming a norm or expected feature rather than a radically or magically revolutionary. For all practical purposed we could push SOA aside. I have always thought SOA is a good programming style/architectural maturity taking help of standardization and nothing else; So long, SOA pundits. We got it now and please work on something else. Lets analyse the key drivers which are relevant to the time that we are passing through now. 

The first and foremost driver is the Cost. Inspite of all those money pumped into the world economy and increased quantitative easing , the doubts about recovery are still looming large and we are yet to experience the next big boom. The CFOs are still vigilant and are cautious to spend in a casino style like we are witnessed few years back.

Secondly , the technology has been commoditised to a phenomenal extent that a Mom&Pop shop can download a OpenSource ERP, BI, BPM , DB etc if they are tech savvy. Laissez-faire is the order of the world now.

Thirdly, due to the ubiquitous nature of the internet and the increased adoption of the smartphones, the expectation for information to be available everywhere is beyond belief. We are going through an era where we are drowned with information both relevant and non relevant. 

Finally, we are getting back to have a social life [well, virtual one] through a plethora of social networking sites. We have started interacting with our near and dear more often than ever. The time that TV used to consume from us is getting slowly shifted to these sites. As we speak, there are atleast 200 million active users facebooking and twittering what they are doing now and what they would be doing in next 7 minutes. This is a very interesting driver as this represents a shift in the way we collaborate, express our emotions and share our needs/deeds. There is a whole new generation for whom this is a way of life. They are much more comfortable choosing that their friends 'Like'. Our social graph is getting increasingly cluttered.

In summary the key drivers of today are 

1. Cost

2. Commoditised technology

3. Increased information availability

4. Busy Social graph

With the above in minds, what could drive the technology world ?

Cost:

1. Cloud computing would become norm. I heard a CIO mentioning Amazon Cloud is more secure than a local vendor hosting his infrastructure with a local vendor

2. Open Source would find its way through the Enterprise mainly wrapped under Cloud based Services. If you are provided a complete CRM that meets your demand through Cloud and if asked to pay 10 quids, you wouldnt mind. Wouldnt you?

Commoditised technology:

3. The availability of best of the breed tools would increase the adoption of Analytics, BPM, ESB etc especially with the Tier 2 companies across domains

4. IT vendors would focus on solving business problems rather than touting their Technology expertise, at last.

RIP Technology driven world!  Now Go to solve the problem which your customer has been grappling with  than killing him [her also] by that 120 slider

Increased information availability

5. The focus would shift from access of information to the creation of knowledge from information. Semantic web could get more prevalent.

6. Devices like smartphones and tablets that helps in Knowledge creation would become the order of the day

Busy Social Graph

7. Buying patterns would be influenced by your social graph. You would be tempted to buy the Apple TV which your friend bragged in FB and got 'Like'd by 30 of your friends

8. Newer social sites for gaming, buying would emerge and stay

9. Focus on User Experience would increase as a differentiator among the competing sellers

10. World is a better place with 9 trends!

We have been going through a linear technology world for a very long time and now the shift is slowly towards a non-linear world where an application that respects users expectation, provides knowledge at a bare minimum cost would be the winner.

Please be advised that there would not be any trends for 2012 by any one as the Mayan's have predicted an end of the World , as we know, next year.

So long and thanks for all the fish. 42. [if you dont understand check out HHGG by Douglas Adams]