the Onda

Not much stuck with me from my days at business school, but one of the few things that did was from this wacky book called "The Goal" about manufacturing optimization. In it, the author uses a boy scout troop, and more specifically a fat kid named Herbie, to make the point that in most cases a system is only as efficient as its least efficient component, and that as such, finding this constraint and being obsessive about how to loosen it tends to yield the best results. Pretty obvious I realize, but over the years I've found that it is a great way to think about emerging technologies and new opportunities.

Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off of Live Mesh, a combination platform/service to sync files and application across all manner of devices. It looks like an interesting project, especially because it seems to leverage some form of feed syndication for its transport layer. But apparently it's more than just a project: it is the grand vision of Ray Ozzie and has sucked up about 2 years and 100 people to get to release (which reminds me of Ozzie's previous Project Groove a.k.a Lotus Notes 2.0 which took serious resources to get to sync files between PCs). Despite it being tiny by Microsoft standards, feeding all of those people for all of that time to get file and application preference sync seems a bit excessive to me.

More importantly, are we really at the point where the world now needs Lotus Notes 3.0? Let's see: 1. devices are proliferating, with smartphones leading the pack... check. 2. More and more personal computing is taking place in "the cloud" on websites like Facebook and Gmail... check. 3. There is still a lot of data being locked into the local hard drives of millions of PC users... check. 4. What we are all dying for is a way to sync all of this stuff so that we can stop thinking about desktop or cloud and seamlessly carry on our personal computing tasks from any device anywhere...really?

Back to Herbie the fat kid and the theory of constraints. Where is it that we are really suffering today? Is it in new protocols to sync data across devices? It seems to me that everyone and their mother is capable of designing sync protocols, and that more importantly, Internet pioneers solved this one even before the days of Lotus 1.0. Instead, there seem to be three clear places where we are currently suffering from constraints that might make for "big play" business opportunities: 1. we never have enough bandwidth in enough places (whether it is cable, DSL, cellular, etc.), 2. we don't yet seem to know how to economically store enough stuff in the cloud, and 3. in the case of portable devices, we never have enough power efficiency.

But more sync protocols? Hybrid platform/services that require buying into one vendor's silo? At best, these things seem to me to be band-aids that are trying to get us around some of these constraints instead of through them.

Interestingly enough, normally M&A-allergic Apple today announced the acquisition of PA Semi, a chip company that focuses exclusively on power management in CPUs, seemingly to address constraint #3 in their iPhone platform.

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