openBravo - opening the source in field dominated by "preying" personalities

Its fascinating to read about an open source initiative in the ERP realm when there exist guerrillas like ORACLE and SAP.
If there are three trends that are characterizing the change in IT, for me those would be – Mobility, Open Source and SaaS.
Tecnicia and later openBravo ventures into 2 of the three (open source and SaaS) and then is looking at multi national expansion and play.
Business wise the strategy would be to capture the wide open SME segment and not to go head to head with the biggies at the large MNC market.
Also service is the right business play in this space since the software is open source.
Interesting to see if they can survive the pressure from two ends – biggies from the upper end and then smaller niche players from the bottom end.

What will be the exit - gobbled up by Mr. Elisson

Regards
Amit Modi

Google Threats

Diversification or Defocus/Diworsification – Google has ventured into many areas – most notably smartphones (not successful). This takes focus away from core competence. A lot of the new services (communication oriented) are free and raises question of continued profitability.

Organizational sustainability – Can Google maintain its corporate culture of innovation and retain employees keeping them motivated. Recent defections do not bode well.

Google and its China strategy – When its about users and eyeballs and human time, China cannot be ignored. While currently China itself is a rounding error for Google today, the implications of Google and its China strategy go beyond just financial (sets stage for further US-China political tension).

a facade or a siren

As we drove back exhausted from the Shanghai expo I pondered - who is the expo for? what is its purpose?
- for nations to be a part of the great Chinese phenomenon which cannot be avoided
- for China to show to their people that they are CAUSING A TRANSFORMATION from West to East in this new global era by being here and now
- for nations to just be there for pure business