The take-away The use of technology at leading companies like Dell, Schwab, and Wal-Mart provides valuable lessons for IT vendors, which will soon need to help less prescient companies get the most out of their investments.
2:14:44 PM    comment   

Here is an interesting stat from the article:

U.S. productivity zoomed by 2.75% a year in the quarter-century after World War II, creating the modern American middle class. Around 1973, productivity growth slowed mysteriously to 1.5%, and showed no signs of revival despite the spread of computers until 1995. Since then, productivity has grown by more than 2.5% a year. This is big. Adding just two-tenths of a percentage point to productivity growth over a decade works out to an extra $1,000 in income for each man, woman and child.

Obviously, we didn't see anything close to this growth in incomes since 1995.  Where did it go?  Into the pockets of CEOs like Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and others is one answer.  It has also been siphoned off by corporations and Wall Street.  Imagine the improvement in personal incomes if American families got the full benefit of productivity improvements.

This chart shows the growth the "Productivity Gap" (note, this is median income which factors out the incomes of super-rich families):

12:55:40 PM    comment   

USA Today on Wi-Fi: A generally well-balanced article surveying mostly hot spot aspects of Wi-Fi. However, the article repeats the fallacy that businesses were reluctant to use Wi-Fi because of WEP's weakness. I continue to argue that WEP is a non-starter for businesses that have actual IT operations that include authentication systems -- which means the scale of businesses mentioned in passing in the article. The writer quotes Gartner's silly nonsense about "86,000" hot spots by 2006: if there are that few, the hot spot industry will have proven to be a non-starter and some kind of 3G system offering lower but ubiquitous bandwidth will have replaced hot spots. More likely 500,000 or a limited patchwork, but not much potential at 86,000. The article also says that Wi-Fi transmissions aren't regulated by the FCC, which is incorrect. The transmission power and characteristics are. It would have been better to say that Wi-Fi users require no special permission from the FCC to operate licensed equipment.

12:39:20 PM    comment   

Boingo Wireless adds PocketPC software to its roster: Boingo supports several PocketPC models with its sniffing and connection software, which allows easy connection to its aggregated hot spot network, as well as managing configurations. The company also launched a PDA version of its Web site. Three preview screens of the software: connection, hot spot directory, and profile manager.

12:11:09 PM    comment