Sandra Sieber, IESE professor

The king of the search engines celebrates ten years of existence amidst favorable reactions from users and applause from the media, but we are now seeing the first symptoms of fear in light of its omnipresence on the Web. 

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Study: Global Cities Attractiveness Survey 2008
Source: Paris-Ile de France Capitale Economique, Ernst & Young, and the CSA Institute
Date: Spring 2008
Abstract: The metropolises that in the 1980s would have been considered truly global cities could be counted on three fingers: New York, London and Tokyo. Today there are about fifty aspiring cities, “from Barcelona to Dubai, Singapore to Chicago, Mumbai to Paris…,” says consulting firm Ernst & Young. But which cities are actually the most attractive in the eyes of companies looking to better position themselves to deal with the challenges of globalization...and how are they evolving?. The Global Cities Attractiveness Survey 2008 estimates that, generally speaking, these focal points are New York, London and Paris, with Tokyo and Beijing following at a distance. The report adds that Asian cities are now well positioned for attracting business headquarters.  As for Europe and specifically the software field, it claims that the most desirable cities are London, Paris and Dublin. In terms of ICT firms, London heads up the list of most attractive European cities, followed by Paris and Berlin, which tie for second place, while Frankfurt sits in the third spot. The Global Cities Attractiveness Survey 2008 is one product of the efforts by the French capital to entice businesses from around the world but is of interest to everyone, particularly those looking to relocate and those aiming to bolster the attractiveness of their cities. Not only because the study includes the opinion of 508 business leaders from 27 countries and 17 different economic sectors, but also because of the effective graphic presentation of its conclusions  its comparison of the current perception of large metropolises, and its real data…which does not always coincide.

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Study: How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008
Source: Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) – Business Software Alliance (BSA)
Date: September 17, 2008
Abstract: The market studies unit of The Economist has published the second edition of this report commissioned by the BSA, which includes the IT industry competitiveness ranking of 66 countries with the world’s highest GDPs. Spain sits at number 23, moving past Italy and making a slight gain of two tenths of a point (46.3 out of 100) with respect to 2007. The United States once again takes the top spot while Japan falls from second to twelfth. Great Britain ranks first in Europe, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Switzerland, with Spain coming in at 13th after losing points due to subpar competitiveness in R&D and its technological infrastructure. “Without fast, reliable and secure Internet access, technology firms cannot interact effectively with partners and the research community, nor can they sell their services online,” say the authors of the Economist Intelligence Unit. The authors also identify six key factors for nurturing an IT sector: a good pool of skills and knowledge to draw from; a culture with a propensity for innovation; top-level IT infrastructure; robust legal protection for intellectual property; an open, competitive economy; and a balance between investing in technology and allowing market forces to work.

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Major mergers and acquisitions often entail layoffs and HP’s megapurchase of EDS will not be an exception. In this case, the buyer will be dismissing 24,600 employees worldwide over the next three years, the equivalent of 7.5% of its staff, which now totals 310,000 following the transaction. According to AFP, 90% of those casualties should affect the staff coming from EDS but just 10% of HP’s employees. Half of the layoffs will happen in the United States while 9,330 will affect its European subsidiaries. According to an article in the French newspaper Les Echos citing union sources, the European offices most affected will be those of England, Italy, Germany and France, in that order. The Spanish newspaper Cinco Días meanwhile reports that UGT (General Workers' Union) estimates that the cutback could affect some 200 employees in Spain, where HP and EDS have a combined total of 6,800 workers. The purchase was made official in late August, as detailed at that time by an EFE report published in the Spanish newspaper El País, which listed the total amount of the transaction at 13.9 billion dollars (9.5 billion euros), highlighting that it had become the largest in IT history, following the 2002 purchase of Compaq, also by HP. Thanks to the acquisition of EDS, HP moves from fifth to second place in the world rankings for IT service providers. At present, according to figures compared by our editorial staff (with a view to clarify conflicting information published in different media sources), the company has a presence in over 170 countries and in 2007 had a turnover of 104.3 billion dollars, with 26,000 million of that coming from its services division, which operates in 80 countries and now totals 80,000 employees. The restructuring is designed to reduce costs by avoiding overlap and equaling the operating margins of EDS with those of HP so as to better position the company to compete with IBM, the world leader in IT services. Margins for EDS, listed as 5%, would currently be less than half those of HP. With respect to layoffs, the company says that although the megamerger of HP and Compaq led in the short term to the termination of 15,000 workers, four years later it created 37,000 new jobs. In any event, the announcement comes at a time when the economic landscape makes it particularly difficult to achieve quick job placement for those laid off.

Articles in Information Week, PC World (Spanish), Les Echos (French), El País (Spanish), Cinco Días (Spanish)

In early August, the specialized publication Infoworld gave an award to Elgg, a platform for creating social networks, in the category of best open-source software for collaboration. At that time, hardly anyone other than specialists even knew what it was. That remains the case but things could change in the future. Specialized blogs have celebrated the recent release of version 1.0 of Elgg (elgg.org) as evidence that open-source software is ready to have its voice be heard in the world of social network creation platforms. In short, Elgg provides a content-management solution that lets anyone create and manage their own social network. The fact that it uses the general public license means it can avoid the limitations of proprietary social networking sites, such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, for instance, which make their own rules for admission and content. The popularity of this type of open-source projects (there are other similar ones in various stages of development) could benefit from the fact that social networks that are too generalized in nature are starting to show signs of fatigue, as Genís Roca explains in “Soluciones para nuevas realidades. Modelos de negocio en las redes sociales” [“Solutions for New Realities: Business Models for Social Networks”], an article that does not refer to Elgg but which is included in the interesting report on social networks published by the magazine Telos in its July/September issue from this year. The important aspect of this new generation of open-source platforms is that they allow anyone to use them as they wish and at no cost, and that they contain the necessary functions for managing a proprietary social network with hardly any need for programming. While this is a budding trend and, as pointed out in the online publication Con el ordenador a cuestas, is still suffering from the inherent defects of its youth, its gradual consolidation could lead to the emergence of a new wave of service providers that would take care of personalizing these sites to their clients’ liking, or even manage and maintain them. At the same time will come an array of both free and paid companion products (themes, i.e., meaning predesigned templates; widgets, hosting services, and more) as we’ve seen with other successful open-source bids, such as the blog creation tool WordPress, for example. Basically, we will see the disappearance of the current technological barriers for starting up a new social network.

Articles in InfoWorld, Con el ordenador a cuestas (Spanish), ZDNet.fr. (French)

This article summarizes a study regarding managers criteria for adopting technologies, performed by the Center. The results show that in Spain, when it comes to adopting technology solutions, the order of priorities generally tends to differ between the large firms and the SMBs. While the vast majority of the former base their decisions on exhaustive analysis of the cost of the technology, SMBs consider that the most important factors are the supplier’s good reputation and its ability to respond to the problems arising during the technology adoption phase.

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