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Home : Business & Farming : Why businesses should care about changing IT landscape

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Why businesses should care about changing IT landscape

By Fanele Chester on September 02,2011

The month of August was fraught with

activity in the information and technology

sector.

From Googles acquisition of Motorola

earlier in the month to Steve Jobs resignation as CEO of Apple

a couple of days ago, and Hewett-Packards decision to stop

making personal computers (PCs), to focus on software

development in the early 90s, the winds of change are signalling

a transformation of the industry.

The Google Experience

Googles acquisition of Motorola for $12.5 billion was not to add a mobile phone business to their

impressive repertoire of acquisitions, but to control the 17 500-strong patents that came with

Motorola. Google realised the need to enter the mobile phone industry as a means of controlling

how customers experience their main product: internet search / web browsing. They achieved this

through the acquisition of Android, an operating system (OS) for mobile phones, in 2005 for $50

million. Android was developed to give customers the best mobile Google experience; indeed users

of search services such as Google Maps and Gmail reported a better experience on Android-

powered phones compared to other competing OS. However, problems surfaced with Android as

some of the specifications that were used to enhance the Google mobile experience infringed on

patented creations. Hence, some of the functionalities that came with the Android OS had to be

altered.The HP Experience

Last week, Hewett-Packards exit from the PC and tablet computer industry came as a surprise to

many, but analysts who have been keeping a close eye on the numbers report that this move had

been coming for a decade now. Many will recall IBMs similar restructuring in the early 1990s.

After running a successful global monopoly of desktops and mainframes, revenues dropped from

$13 billion in 1990 to $7 billion in 1993 and losses of $16 billion piled up. 35 000 employees were

released to cut costs. A statement released by HP said the company was focusing on higher-margin,

strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and

government markets.

Apples Destructive Innovation

There is an unanimous agreement that the restructuring of the IT industry is attributed to one main

player: Apple. The technology giant recently toppled Exxon Mobil Corp. to become the United

States most valuable company. In other words, the iPad became more valuable than oil.

Competitors in the IT industry took the tip: it was time to restrategise their core operations, or risk

being left out. For companies like Google, it suddenly became imperative to control not only the

software platforms that run their product, but to be fully involved and integrated in the process.

The Next Experience: Cloud Computing

How does all this affect service delivery by businesses in Swaziland? The reach of mobile phones

globally, the accent of smart phones and tablet computers, coupled with advances in internet

connectivity, means more people want information, quickly, and from anywhere they happen to be

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