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Globalization, Technology, And The Business Sector
By kaye
What is globalization and when did it start? The term “globalization” has been used by economists since 1981 but many agree that the phenomenon really started only during the latter half of 1990's. Many specialists define globalization as a principal economic phenomenon which involves integration of economic systems around the world. This leads to the growth of international trade, investment, and capital. It is also a point where there is a breakthrough in culture, society, and technology between countries. In layman's term it is the “process by which the experience of everyday life becomes standardized around the world. This term is, perhaps, best understood as the spread of ideas about the environment, democracy, human rights, and less complicated issues like fashion and fads. Because of globalization, the world has become “flatter” --- removing traditional barriers of language and culture, bridging the enormous geographical divide through science and technology.
Economists and business experts point out that globalization, despite the risk it entails, has already produced tangible benefits. Consumers of goods and services around the world now have the capacity to buy from a the “world's market.” Increased competition, comparative advantage, and access to wider range of products and services.
International trade, investment and cooperation had actually started more than 50 years ago with the formation of the League of Nations --- the predecessor of the United Nations. International agreements paved way for lower tariffs and enabled tons of goods to be traded around the world. Today, the gap between the rich and poor countries has grown smaller. Even Southeast Asian countries can now compete with its Western counterparts in terms of trade and commerce.
Globalization has also brought unprecedented innovations in technology. Technology has changed the way we work, study, and live our lives. The whole process of doing business had also been revolutionized by technology. Relationships between suppliers, producers, retailers and customers have been transformed by the speed and convenience of technology and 21st century telecommunications.
Adaptive user interfaces
<a
href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kgajos/papers/supple-iui04.pdf">Supple:
automatically generating user interfaces</a>, by Krzysztof Gajos and
Dan Weld<br>
This shows a promising approach to something that is going to become
increasingly important as people start using different kinds of
devices to access their applications - phones, TVs, PCs, dedicated
devices, etc. They treat interface construction as an optimization
problem. Given a set of tasks and associated model elements, along
with a set of available user interface elements, Supple will generate
a user interface. It takes into account effort metrics for the
different elements and transitions so that it can generate different
widget selections for phones, touch screens, and WIMP
interfaces. Furthermore, it can include statistical information from
user activity traces to optimize the interface for more frequent
tasks. They actually did comparative studies with human designers
(students who had taken an HCI course), and Supple did about as
well. Supple isn't going to run the Excel or Photoshop UI anytime
soon, but it's not far from being useful for line-of-business
applications and third-tier websites, most of which have atrocious
usability. If Microsoft IT started using this I'd applaud - right now,
I cringe every time I fill out an expense report or renew my parking
permit. (On further thought, maybe it's not so far from being useful
for Office - I bet the new Office UI redesign produced much of the task
analysis that Supple would need...)
Economics of Software as a Service
<a href="http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/PDFDownload.aspx?L2=4&L3=43&ar=2006&srid=17">
Delivering Software as a Service - McKinsey Quarterly</a>
<p>Two interesting data points:</p>
<p>While SaaS companies have lower operating margins than packaged
software companies overall, if you restrict the comparison to
comparably-sized packaged software companies, the numbers look
essentially identical:<br>
<img src="/sw/McKinseySaas1.gif"/></p>
<p>However, if you look at the customer cost side, there's a huge
advantage to SaaS:<br>
<img src="/sw/McKinseySaas2.gif"/></p>
Bayesian Collaboration
<a href="http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/personal/vita/pubs/CACHE2BayesCommunity.pdf">
Multistage Collaboration in CACHE: The Bayes Community Model</a><br>
CACHE has a simple structured collaboration model - an investigator
makes hypotheses as a result of evidence, and one person's hypothesis
can be another person's evidence. This is enough to allow the system
to track provenance of conclusions, and update beliefs through
Bayesian inference as new information is added. It would be a very
powerful tool for collaborative investigation, decision making, or
data analysis. (Via <a href="http://www.pancrit.org">Chris
Hibbert</a>).
Quick Links
<p><a
href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/logic-fast05.pdf">A
Logic of Filesystems</a><br> An interesting general logical framework
for modeling the memory & disk consistency of filesystems - not just
to ensure they are correct, but also to avoid unnecessary operations
that don't add to logical consistency guarantees. Of course, as my
officemate <a href="http://keithaka.com">Keith Kaplan</a> responds,
"Would I sound like a bitter FS guy if I pointed out that the vast
majority of disk hardware is provably incorrect, and then asked why
does everybody place such high standards on the filesystem? Yes, I
think I do sound like a bitter FS guy. <g>" I suppose it still might
be a way to analyze how you handle all the provably incorrect errors
disks throw at you...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Ekchak/papers/csp-asplos06.pdf">
Computation Spreading: Employing Hardware Migration to Specialize CMP
Cores On-the-fly</a><br> Separating OS and application threads to
different cores yields significant performance increase by reducing
contention for cache, branch prediction, etc. They do this using VM
instructions, but a microkernel could do this more explicitly.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2008/jan/16-sbnl-predictive-model-for-cell">A
Predictive Model for Transcriptional Control of Physiology in a Free
Living Cell</a><br> They were able to get significant predictive power
for transciption behavior in new experiments from a relatively small
number of microarray samples and other data. Unfortunately, Microsoft
doesn't (yet :-) have a subscription to <i>Cell</i> so I can't read
the original paper...</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright_talk.pdf">Forever
Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright</a><br> A
very nice application of straightforward economic analysis of the
variables affecting the social welfare from copyright (discount rate,
"cultural decay" rate of value of work, production cost, value of new
work produced vs. additional value gained from releasing copyright on
older works, etc.) Even though the empirical data only give rather
wide ranges of estimates for these, they show that the current
copyright terms are much too long under a robust set of assumptions;
the best estimate is that the optimal term is around 15 years.</p>
K42 and Tornado
My colleague Eric Northup has mentioned these a few times, and I'm
glad I looked them up. The Tornado OS (from my alma mater, U of T) and
its successor <a
href="http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/k42.index.html#publications">K42</a>
(at IBM Research) use a fine-grained object-oriented approach to all
operating system structures (processes, memory regions, etc.), with
built-in clustering for replicated instances across processors. This
reduces lock contention and increases cache locality by operating on
the per-processor instance as much as possible. Since objects are
generally expected to be local, it can optimize for this case, and
track cross-processor operations as a special case. There are some
policy choices (e.g. maintaining replica tables for all processors)
that would probably need to be adapted for manycore.
<p> The scalability architecture is best described in <a
href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/scalability-techrep.pdf">this
paper</a>. The memory manager was key, e.g. for locality-aware
allocation, padding to cache line size to avoid false sharing,
deferring deletion until quiescence to avoid existence locks, etc. An
insight as the basic Tornado model was applied to real workloads was
that creation-time object specialization isn't sufficient, instead it
is better to for example start with an unshared implementation and
then upgrade to shared implementation when multiple processes share an
object. They were able to improve their 24-proc scalability from
"terrible" to pretty good in 2 weeks of work because of good OO
discipline and <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/sc03.pdf">
tracing infrastructure</a>.
<p> Overall, I found it striking how the scalability architecture
mirrored that for distributed systems - state partitioning,
replication, <a
href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/oasis04.pdf"> dynamic
upgrade</a>, etc. I had expected this from general principles, but it
was valuable to see it confirmed in practice with significant
workloads. The scalability graphs are impressively linear. Security
isn't mentioned, but I expect that the same OO design that gives the
OS good modularity and scalability could be applied to give it good
capability discipline as well.
Concurrency is here to stay
I was looking through the <a
href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/07/1114BOF.html">slides from the
NCSA Petascale BOF session at SC07</a>. The slides weren't a
particularly good substitute for the actual presentation,
unfortunately. However, this graph caught my eye - in case you were
wondering whether we'd hit the single-processor scaling wall, it
leaves little room for doubt:<br> <img src="/sw/NCSAPetascale-Shalf.jpg">
Because of technology, many people have been connected to the world. Expanding technology brings with it new markets, increased demand for products, and greater competition.
Globalization also gave birth to outsourcing which is incidentally one of the reasons why competition in the business sector is now on level ground. Outsourcing, as a business leveraging tool, involves the transfer of management and day-to-day execution of a certain business function to an external service provider. The business company and the outsourcing company enter into a contract that defines the transferred service. Outsourcing providers, design solutions based on the companies background needs. They focus on certain companies' strengths and improve their weaknesses. This enables companies to save time and resources. Outsourcing providers evaluate companies and find out if they possess the right technology and enough capabilities to excel in that particular field. These providers improve companies' chances to sell more products and formulate future solutions, and promote forth coming events and sales. Outsourcing these days proved to be effective and economical for the small and upscale businesses.
Indeed, globalization is a phenomenon or, more appropriately, a immense force for effecting great change through technology, communications, and economics. Time, distance, and geography are no longer seen as walls that divide but opportunities for exploration. Because of globalization, sustainable development of communities and poor countries have also been placed in the center of the world's attention. Aside from bringing enormous profits for the business sector, globalization had also become a means for entire nations to improve their economy, culture, and way of life. InContact24-7 is an award winning call center that provides live 24x7 and 365 days call center outsourcing services for companies of all sizes and industries. InContact24-7 when you need it...
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