The Bloor Perspective: PeopleSoft success, Taliban bans, and confessions of a GPRS user

Among all the doom and gloom of the IT industry's slowdown there are a few glints of hope. While many vendors talk of extended sales cycles and lowered estimates PeopleSoft has announced results exceeding Wall Street expectations.

PeopleSoft's strategy is clearly to become the leader in the integrated application market. Only last month the company launched PeopleSoft 8 CRM with the stated intention of stealing the CRM crown from Siebel, the acknowledged market leader. With continued pressure on many companies to become alchemists - having the ability to increase productivity while decreasing costs - the adoption of internet-based ebusiness solutions has become increasingly common, with PeopleSoft 8 being a popular choice.

Although many vendors are facing the vagaries of the economy there are some, like PeopleSoft, who appear to be better placed to weather the storm. SAP, one of PeopleSoft's competitors has recently announced a strong set of results and it appears that vendors with an established customer base - and therefore on-going licensing revenue streams - are not as susceptible as some newer companies to the slowdown.

It's not all good news for the established software vendors. Oracle customers have been finding more than a few problems in the move to the latest version of the vendor's integrated ebusiness solution. Most of the problems have been a result of the change in architecture. Version 10.7 was client/server-based, or at least a client/server and internet hybrid. While this is the cause for some problems it is unlikely to account for all 5,000 software patches that have been released in the first year of release.

So as PeopleSoft and SAP march on, Oracle still has a few lessons to learn. One thing that perhaps Oracle might want to take note of is PeopleSoft's handling of Wall Street. Manage their expectations - set them low and then exceed them.

*Taliban Bans*

The Taliban ban tally is mounting by the week. Fast on the heels of the regime's internet ban two weeks ago comes a new ban on computer disks. And you think you've got storage problems.

The reason given for the internet ban was stopping immoral material flooding into the country. Foreign Minister Muttawakil was at pains to explain this wasn't an attack on the internet itself, merely on unwanted content. Sadistic images of whipping, stoning and beheading may be OK in reality, but not over the internet.

If you can't save information to disk, tape is a possibility (until that too gets banned) but stone tablets look a likely bet. Anybody out there written a driver for stone tablets?

In the West, we may have a better understanding of the difficulties inherent in controlling the internet but that is not going to stop totalitarian regimes having a go. China, having introduced draconian censorship measures at the beginning of this year, last week closed down 2,000 cyber cafes and made another 6,000 suspend business until they conformed with changes.

This promises an interesting scenario when China comes to host the Olympic Games in 2008. China's censorship may lack the extreme absurdity of Afghanistan's but is certain to pose problems for western news agencies. Of course, there's plenty of time for official attitudes in China to change in the meantime but the content issue could prove a hilarious sideshow.

GPRS: One early adopter's story

Everyone seems to have an opinion on GPRS. Some claim it is the next big step in the evolution of wireless technology, bridging the gap between the present and the 3G networks of the future. Others say it will be the next biggest flop after WAP - an immature technology with a short shelf life.

I want to take you through my personal experience of GPRS from a user perspective and impart some of the conclusions I reached as an 'early adopter'.

I had been reading about the launch of GPRS by a number of vendors and decided to nose around one of the high street dealers. 20 minutes later, I was walking down the road swinging my little carrier bag containing a shiny new GPRS phone and a contract saying I had access to the high-speed mobile internet for £7.99 a month.

My first impression was a little "so what". The "so what" came when I discovered that there wasn't that much difference between old and new phones in terms of speed. Sometimes the GSM handset won, sometimes the GPRS phone came out on top.

Then something really interesting happened. I found myself browsing. Actually browsing.

With a GPRS phone, things are quite different. You can take your time for one thing, knowing that the clock doesn't matter. You pay for what you do, not for how long you take to do it. GPRS removes that feeling of pressure to limit time online because of the cost of minutes.

Pressure to complete things to avoid having to go through the whole connect and logon cycle again later just goes away. This leads to much more frequent and casual access. Got a few minutes to spare - kill time on the WAP phone. This is the stuff that habits are made of.

I came to the conclusion that GPRS is much more significant than I had realised and it has very little to do with bandwidth. In GPRS, we are seeing the beginnings of a much more natural, comfortable and convenient way of using information and entertainment services while on the move. OK, the whole thing is masked by the limitations of the handsets and the scarcity of quality services, but those issues will be fixed over time - very quickly in the case of devices.

My bottom line conclusion after this experience is that if you look carefully - beyond the hype, the cynicism and the immediate practical limitations - you will catch a glimpse of a new and much more personal user interaction model emerging that will make mobile data services as inherent a part of our daily lives as mobile voice services are today.