■ How do companies organize their ERP projects?

Based on our observations, there are three commonly used ways of installing ERP.

1. The Big Bang
In this, the most ambitious and difficult of approaches to ERP implementation, companies cast off all their legacy systems at once and install a single ERP system across the entire company. Though this method dominated early ERP implementations, few companies dare to attempt it anymore because it calls for the entire company to mobilize and change at once. Most of the ERP implementation horror stories from the late ’90s warn us about companies that used this strategy.Getting everyone to cooperate and accept a new software system at the same time is a tremendous effort, largely because the new system will not have any advocates. No one within the company has any experience using it, so no one is sure whether it will work. Also, ERP inevitably involves compromises. Many departments have computer systems that have been honed to match the ways they work. In most cases, ERP offers neither the range of functionality nor the comfort of familiarity that a custom legacy system can offer. In many cases, the speed of the new system may suffer because it is serving the entire company rather than a single department. ERP implementation requires a direct mandate from the CEO.

2. Franchising strategy
This approach suits large or diverse companies that do not share many common processes across business units. Independent ERP systems are installed in each unit, while linking common processes, such as financial bookkeeping, across the enterprise. This has emerged as the most common way of implementing ERP. In most cases, the business units each have their own “instances” of ERP—that is, a separate system and database. The systems link together only to share the information necessary for the corporation to get a performance big picture across all the business units (business unit revenues, for example), or for processes that don’t vary much from business unit to business unit (perhaps HR benefits). Usually, these implementations begin with a demonstration or pilot installation in a particularly open-minded and patient business unit where the core business of the corporation will not be disrupted if something goes wrong. Once the project team gets the system up and running and works out all the bugs, the team begins selling other units on ERP, using the first implementation as a kind of in-house customer reference. Plan for this strategy to take a long time.

3. Slam dunk
ERP dictates the process design in this method, where the focus is on just a few key processes, such as those contained in an ERP system’s financial module. The slam dunk is generally for smaller companies expecting to grow into ERP. The goal here is to get ERP up and running quickly and to ditch the fancy reengineering in favor of the ERP system’s “canned” processes. Few companies that have approached ERP this way can claim much payback from the new system. Most use it as an infrastructure to support more diligent installation efforts down the road. Yet many discover that a slammed-in ERP system is little better than a legacy system because it doesn’t force employees to change any of their old habits. In fact, doing the hard work of process reengineering after the system is in can be more challenging than if there had been no system at all because at that point few people in the company will have felt much benefit.

■ How does ERP fit with e-commerce?

ERP vendors were not prepared for the onslaught of e-commerce. ERP is complex and not intended for public consumption. It assumes that the only people handling order information will be your employees, who are highly trained and comfortable with the tech jargon embedded in the software. But now customers and suppliers are demanding access to the same information your employees get through the ERP system—things like order status, inventory levels and invoice reconciliation—except they want to get all this information simply, without all the ERP software jargon, through your website.

E-commerce means IT departments need to build two new channels of access in to ERP systems—one for customers (otherwise known as business-to-consumer) and one for suppliers and partners (business-to-business). These two audiences want two different types of information from your ERP system. Consumers want order status and billing information, and suppliers and partners want just about everything else.

Traditional ERP vendors are having a hard time building the links between the Web and their software, though they certainly all realize that they must do it and have been hard at work at it for years. The bottom line, however, is that companies with e-commerce ambitions face a lot of hard integration work to make their ERP systems available over the Web. For those companies that were smart—or lucky—enough to have bought their ERP systems from a vendor experienced in developing e-commerce wares, adding easily integrated applications from that same vendor can be a money-saving option. For those companies whose ERP systems came from vendors that are less experienced with e-commerce development, the best—and possibly only—option might be to have a combination of internal staff and consultants hack through a custom integration.

But no matter what the details are, solving the difficult problem of integrating ERP and e-commerce requires careful planning, which is key to getting integration off on the right track.

One of the most difficult aspects of ERP and e-commerce integration is that the Internet never stops. ERP applications are big and complex and require maintenance. The choice is stark if ERP is linked directly to the Web—take down your ERP system for maintenance and you take down your website. Most e-commerce veterans will build flexibility into the ERP and e-commerce links so that they can keep the new e-commerce applications running on the Web while they shut down ERP for upgrades and fixes.

The difficulty of getting ERP and e-commerce applications to work together—not to mention the other applications that demand ERP information such as supply chain and CRM software—has led companies to consider software known alternately as middleware and EAI software. These applications act as software translators that take information from ERP and convert it into a format that e-commerce and other applications can understand. Middleware has improved dramatically in recent years, and though it is difficult to sell and prove ROI on the software with business leaders—it is invisible to computer users—it can help solve many of the biggest integration woes that plague IT these days.

From CIO.com

■ What are the hidden costs of ERP?

Although different companies will find different land mines in the budgeting process, those who have implemented ERP packages agree that certain costs are more commonly overlooked or underestimated than others. Armed with insights from across the business, ERP pros vote the following areas as most likely to result in budget overrun.

1. Training
Training is the near-unanimous choice of experienced ERP implementers as the most underestimated budget item. Training expenses are high because workers almost invariably have to learn a new set of processes, not just a new software interface. Worse, outside training companies may not be able to help you. They are focused on telling people how to use software, not on educating people about the particular ways you do business. Prepare to develop a curriculum yourself that identifies and explains the different business processes that will be affected by the ERP system. One enterprising CIO hired staff from a local business school to help him develop and teach the ERP business-training course to employees. Remember that with ERP, finance people will be using the same software as warehouse people and they will both be entering information that affects the other. To do this accurately, they have to have a much broader understanding of how others in the company do their jobs than they did before ERP came along. Ultimately, it will be up to your IT and businesspeople to provide that training. So take whatever you have budgeted for ERP training and double or triple it up front. It will be the best ERP investment you ever make.

2. Integration and testing
Testing the links between ERP packages and other corporate software links that have to be built on a case-by-case basis is another often-underestimated cost. A typical manufacturing company may have add-on applications from the major—e-commerce and supply chain—to the minor—sales tax computation and bar coding. All require integration links to ERP. If you can buy add-ons from the ERP vendor that are pre-integrated, you’re better off. If you need to build the links yourself, expect things to get ugly. As with training, testing ERP integration has to be done from a process-oriented perspective. Veterans recommend that instead of plugging in dummy data and moving it from one application to the next, run a real purchase order through the system, from order entry through shipping and receipt of payment—the whole order-to-cash banana—preferably with the participation of the employees who will eventually do those jobs.

3. Customization
Add-ons are only the beginning of the integration costs of ERP. Much more costly, and something to be avoided if at all possible, is actual customization of the core ERP software itself. This happens when the ERP software can’t handle one of your business processes and you decide to mess with the software to make it do what you want. You’re playing with fire. The customizations can affect every module of the ERP system because they are all so tightly linked together. Upgrading the ERP package—no walk in the park under the best of circumstances—becomes a nightmare because you’ll have to do the customization all over again in the new version. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. No matter what, the vendor will not be there to support you. You will have to hire extra staffers to do the customization work, and keep them on for good to maintain it.

4. Data conversion
It costs money to move corporate information, such as customer and supplier records, product design data and the like, from old systems to new ERP homes. Although few CIOs will admit it, most data in most legacy systems is of little use. Companies often deny their data is dirty until they actually have to move it to the new client/server setups that popular ERP packages require. Consequently, those companies are more likely to underestimate the cost of the move. But even clean data may demand some overhaul to match process modifications necessitated—or inspired—by the ERP implementation.
Data analysis - Often, the data from the ERP system must be combined with data from external systems for analysis purposes. Users with heavy analysis needs should include the cost of a data warehouse in the ERP budget—and they should expect to do quite a bit of work to make it run smoothly. Users are in a pickle here: Refreshing all the ERP data every day in a big corporate data warehouse is difficult, and ERP systems do a poor job of indicating which information has changed from day to day, making selective warehouse updates tough. One expensive solution is custom programming. The upshot is that the wise will check all their data analysis needs before signing off on the budget.

5. Consultants ad infinitum
When users fail to plan for disengagement, consulting fees run wild. To avoid this, companies should identify objectives for which its consulting partners must aim when training internal staff. Include metrics in the consultants’ contract; for example, a specific number of the user company’s staff should be able to pass a project-management leadership test—similar to what Big Five consultants have to pass to lead an ERP engagement.

6. Replacing your best and brightest
It is accepted wisdom that ERP success depends on staffing the project with the best and brightest from the business and IS divisions. The software is too complex and the business changes too dramatic to trust the project to just anyone. The bad news is a company must be prepared to replace many of those people when the project is over. Though the ERP market is not as hot as it once was, consultancies and other companies that have lost their best people will be hounding yours with higher salaries and bonus offers than you can afford—or that your HR policies permit. Huddle with HR early on to develop a retention bonus program and create new salary strata for ERP veterans. If you let them go, you’ll wind up hiring them—or someone like them—back as consultants for twice what you paid them in salaries.

7. Implementation teams can never stop
Most companies intend to treat their ERP implementation as they would any other software project. Once the software is installed, they figure the team will be scuttled and everyone will go back to his or her day job. But after ERP, you can’t go home again. The implementers are too valuable. Because they have worked intimately with ERP, they know more about the sales process than the salespeople and more about the manufacturing process than the manufacturing people. Companies can’t afford to send their project people back into the business because there’s so much to do after the ERP software is installed. Just writing reports to pull information out of the new ERP system will keep the project team busy for a year at least. And it is in analysis—and, one hopes, insight—that companies make their money back on an ERP implementation. Unfortunately, few IS departments plan for the frenzy of post-ERP installation activity, and fewer still build it into their budgets when they start their ERP projects. Many are forced to beg for more money and staff immediately after the go-live date, long before the ERP project has demonstrated any benefit.

8. Waiting for ROI
One of the most misleading legacies of traditional software project management is that the company expects to gain value from the application as soon as it is installed, while the project team expects a break and maybe a pat on the back. Neither expectation applies to ERP. Most of the systems don’t reveal their value until after companies have had them running for some time and can concentrate on making improvements in the business processes that are affected by the system. And the project team is not going to be rewarded until their efforts pay off.

9. Post-ERP depression
ERP systems often wreak cause havoc in the companies that install them. In a recent Deloitte Consulting survey of 64 Fortune 500 companies, one in four admitted that they suffered a drop in performance when their ERP system went live. The true percentage is undoubtedly much higher. The most common reason for the performance problems is that everything looks and works differently from the way it did before. When people can’t do their jobs in the familiar way and haven’t yet mastered the new way, they panic, and the business goes into spasms.

■ Why do ERP projects fail so often?

At its simplest level, ERP is a set of best practices for performing different duties in your company, including finance, manufacturing and the warehouse. To get the most from the software, you have to get people inside your company to adopt the work methods outlined in the software. If the people in the different departments that will use ERP don’t agree that the work methods embedded in the software are better than the ones they currently use, they will resist using the software or will want IT to change the software to match the ways they currently do things. This is where ERP projects break down. Political fights break out over how—or even whether—the software will be installed. IT gets bogged down in long, expensive customization efforts to modify the ERP software to fit with powerful business barons’ wishes. Customizations make the software more unstable and harder to maintain when it finally does come to life. The horror stories you hear in the press about ERP can usually be traced to the changes the company made in the core ERP software to fit its own work methods. Because ERP covers so much of what a business does, a failure in the software can bring a company to a halt, literally.

But IT can fix the bugs pretty quickly in most cases, and besides, few big companies can avoid customizing ERP in some fashion—every business is different and is bound to have unique work methods that a vendor cannot account for when developing its software. The mistake companies make is assuming that changing people’s habits will be easier than customizing the software. It’s not. Getting people inside your company to use the software to improve the ways they do their jobs is by far the harder challenge. If your company is resistant to change, then your ERP project is more likely to fail.

From CIO.com

■ What will ERP fix in my business?

There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP.

1. Integrate financial information
As the CEO tries to understand the company’s overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.

2.Integrate customer order information
ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can’t communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and shipping among many different locations at the same time.

3.Standardize and speed up manufacturing processes
Manufacturing companies—especially those with an appetite for mergers and acquisitions—often find that multiple business units across the company make the same widget using different methods and computer systems. ERP systems come with standard methods for automating some of the steps of a manufacturing process. Standardizing those processes and using a single, integrated computer system can save time, increase productivity and reduce head count.

4.Reduce inventory
ERP helps the manufacturing process flow more smoothly, and it improves visibility of the order fulfillment process inside the company. That can lead to reduced inventories of the stuff used to make products (work-in-progress inventory), and it can help users better plan deliveries to customers, reducing the finished good inventory at the warehouses and shipping docks. To really improve the flow of your supply chain, you need supply chain software, but ERP helps too.

5.Standardize HR information
Especially in companies with multiple business units, HR may not have a unified, simple method for tracking employees’ time and communicating with them about benefits and services. ERP can fix that.
In the race to fix these problems, companies often lose sight of the fact that ERP packages are nothing more than generic representations of the ways a typical company does business. While most packages are exhaustively comprehensive, each industry has its quirks that make it unique. Most ERP systems were designed to be used by discrete manufacturing companies (that make physical things that can be counted), which immediately left all the process manufacturers (oil, chemical and utility companies that measure their products by flow rather than individual units) out in the cold. Each of these industries has struggled with the different ERP vendors to modify core ERP programs to their needs.

■ What does ERP really cost?

Meta Group recently did a study looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of ERP, including hardware, software, professional services and internal staff costs. The TCO numbers include getting the software installed and the two years afterward, which is when the real costs of maintaining, upgrading and optimizing the system for your business are felt. Among the 63 companies surveyed—including small, medium and large companies in a range of industries—the average TCO was $15 million (the highest was $300 million and lowest was $400,000). While it’s hard to draw a solid number from that kind of range of companies and ERP efforts, Meta came up with one statistic that proves that ERP is expensive no matter what kind of company is using it. The TCO for a “heads-down” user over that period was a staggering $53,320.

■ When will I get payback from ERP—and how much will it be?

Don’t expect to revolutionize your business with ERP. It is a navel-gazing exercise that focuses on optimizing the way things are done internally rather than with customers, suppliers or partners. Yet the navel gazing has a pretty good payback if you’re willing to wait for it—a Meta Group study of 63 companies found that it took eight months after the new system was in (31 months total) to see any benefits. But the median annual savings from the new ERP system were $1.6 million.

From CIO.com

■ How long will an ERP project take?

Companies that install ERP do not have an easy time of it. Don’t be fooled when ERP vendors tell you about a three or six month average implementation time. Those short (that’s right, six months is short) implementations all have a catch of one kind or another: The company was small, or the implementation was limited to a small area of the company, or the company used only the financial pieces of the ERP system (in which case the ERP system is nothing more than a very expensive accounting system). To do ERP right, the ways you do business will need to change and the ways people do their jobs will need to change too. And that kind of change doesn’t come without pain. Unless, of course, your ways of doing business are working extremely well (orders all shipped on time, productivity higher than all your competitors, customers completely satisfied), in which case there is no reason to even consider ERP.

The important thing is not to focus on how long it will take—real transformational ERP efforts usually run between one and three years, on average—but rather to understand why you need it and how you will use it to improve your business.

■ What will ERP fix in my business?

There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP.

1. Integrate financial information
As the CEO tries to understand the company’s overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.

2.Integrate customer order information
ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can’t communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and shipping among many different locations at the same time.

3.Standardize and speed up manufacturing processes
Manufacturing companies—especially those with an appetite for mergers and acquisitions—often find that multiple business units across the company make the same widget using different methods and computer systems. ERP systems come with standard methods for automating some of the steps of a manufacturing process. Standardizing those processes and using a single, integrated computer system can save time, increase productivity and reduce head count.

4.Reduce inventory
ERP helps the manufacturing process flow more smoothly, and it improves visibility of the order fulfillment process inside the company. That can lead to reduced inventories of the stuff used to make products (work-in-progress inventory), and it can help users better plan deliveries to customers, reducing the finished good inventory at the warehouses and shipping docks. To really improve the flow of your supply chain, you need supply chain software, but ERP helps too.

5.Standardize HR information
Especially in companies with multiple business units, HR may not have a unified, simple method for tracking employees’ time and communicating with them about benefits and services. ERP can fix that.
In the race to fix these problems, companies often lose sight of the fact that ERP packages are nothing more than generic representations of the ways a typical company does business. While most packages are exhaustively comprehensive, each industry has its quirks that make it unique. Most ERP systems were designed to be used by discrete manufacturing companies (that make physical things that can be counted), which immediately left all the process manufacturers (oil, chemical and utility companies that measure their products by flow rather than individual units) out in the cold. Each of these industries has struggled with the different ERP vendors to modify core ERP programs to their needs.

From CIO.com

■ What is ERP?

Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, doesn’t live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn’t do much of that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP’s true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs.

That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.

That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly.

Take a customer order, for example. Typically, when a customer places an order, that order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different departments’ computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one in the company truly knows what the status of the order is at any given point because there is no way for the finance department, for example, to get into the warehouse’s computer system to see whether the item has been shipped. “You’ll have to call the warehouse” is the familiar refrain heard by frustrated customers.

ERP vanquishes the old standalone computer systems in finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse, and replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly approximate the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors’ ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of the functions for another day.

■ How can ERP improve a company’s business performance?

ERP’s best hope for demonstrating value is as a sort of battering ram for improving the way your company takes a customer order and processes it into an invoice and revenue—otherwise known as the order fulfillment process. That is why ERP is often referred to as back-office software. It doesn’t handle the up-front selling process (although most ERP vendors have recently developed CRM software to do this); rather, ERP takes a customer order and provides a software road map for automating the different steps along the path to fulfilling it. When a customer service representative enters a customer order into an ERP system, he has all the information necessary to complete the order (the customer’s credit rating and order history from the finance module, the company’s inventory levels from the warehouse module and the shipping dock’s trucking schedule from the logistics module, for example).

People in these different departments all see the same information and can update it. When one department finishes with the order it is automatically routed via the ERP system to the next department. To find out where the order is at any point, you need only log in to the ERP system and track it down. With luck, the order process moves like a bolt of lightning through the organization, and customers get their orders faster and with fewer errors than before. ERP can apply that same magic to the other major business processes, such as employee benefits or financial reporting.

That, at least, is the dream of ERP. The reality is much harsher.

Let’s go back to those inboxes for a minute. That process may not have been efficient, but it was simple. Finance did its job, the warehouse did its job, and if anything went wrong outside of the department’s walls, it was somebody else’s problem. Not anymore. With ERP, the customer service representatives are no longer just typists entering someone’s name into a computer and hitting the return key. The ERP screen makes them businesspeople. It flickers with the customer’s credit rating from the finance department and the product inventory levels from the warehouse. Will the customer pay on time? Will we be able to ship the order on time? These are decisions that customer service representatives have never had to make before, and the answers affect the customer and every other department in the company. But it’s not just the customer service representatives who have to wake up. People in the warehouse who used to keep inventory in their heads or on scraps of paper now need to put that information online. If they don’t, customer service reps will see low inventory levels on their screens and tell customers that their requested item is not in stock. Accountability, responsibility and communication have never been tested like this before.

People don’t like to change, and ERP asks them to change how they do their jobs. That is why the value of ERP is so hard to pin down. The software is less important than the changes companies make in the ways they do business. If you use ERP to improve the ways your people take orders, manufacture goods, ship them and bill for them, you will see value from the software. If you simply install the software without changing the ways people do their jobs, you may not see any value at all—indeed, the new software could slow you down by simply replacing the old software that everyone knew with new software that no one does.

From CIO.com

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.’s new MSN China Internet venture is censoring words such as “freedom,” “democracy” and “human rights” on its free online journals, Microsoft said on Tuesday, putting itself in the middle of a major Web controversy.

The world’s largest software maker said that its “MSN Spaces” service operated out of China, which allows users to set up their own blogs, or online journals, was acting in accordance with local laws.

“MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates,” said Brooke Richardson, MSN lead product manager.

The move comes as the Chinese government attempts to tighten control over the Internet. Last week, a media watchdog group said China would close unregistered China-based domestic web sites and blogs. About three-quarters of domestic Web sites had complied with the registration orders, the group, Reporters without Borders said, citing Chinese figures.

Microsoft rivals such as Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and InterActiveCorp., which have made a string of acquisitions to expand their operations in China, have also been known to censor content in the country.

Words and phrases banned in the subject line of entries for Microsoft’s MSN Spaces on Tuesday also included “Taiwan independence” and “demonstration,” which returned an error message saying “prohibited language, please remove.”

Not even former and current leaders’ names such as “Mao Zedong” or “Hu Jintao” were allowed.

Most of the phrases, however, were allowed in the body of the entries.

Other blog sites lashed out at Microsoft. Online tech forum Slashdot had user comments calling the censorship a “really really awful thing” and accusing the software giant of trying to appease China’s government in the interest of conducting business.

Matt Rosoff, analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm in Kirkland, Washington, pointed out that any censorship by Microsoft’s online service was relatively minor compared to the broader censorship by the Chinese government over all Internet activity.

“If Microsoft wants to do business in China they have to obey the laws set by the Chinese government,” Rosoff said, adding that “they’ve done the calculations and decided this was worth it.”

Microsoft’s censorship was first reported by bloggers and news outlets in Asia after MSN Spaces was launched in China on May 26. So far, five million blogs have been created with the service, Microsoft said.

The company has long seen China as a key growth market, but also as a headache because of widespread software piracy and copyright issues. China represents the world’s second-largest Internet market with 94 million users at the end of 2004, a number expected to rise to 134 million by the end of this year, according to official data.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft launched MSN China last month by establishing a joint venture with government-operated Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (SAIL) to develop more communication, information and content tied to China.

From Yahoo.com

KAIFENG, China As this millennium dawns, New York City is the most important city in the world, the unofficial capital of planet Earth. But before we New Yorkers become too full of ourselves, it might be worthwhile to glance at dilapidated Kaifeng in central China.

Kaifeng, an ancient city along the mud-clogged Yellow River, was by far the most important place in the world in 1000. And if you’ve never heard of it, that’s a useful warning for Americans - as the Chinese headline above puts it, in a language of the future that many more Americans should start learning, “glory is as ephemeral as smoke and clouds.”

As the world’s only superpower, America may look today as if global domination is an entitlement. But if you look back at the sweep of history, it’s striking how fleeting supremacy is, particularly for individual cities.

My vote for most important city in the world in the period leading up to 2000 B.C. would be Ur, Iraq. In 1500 B.C., perhaps Thebes, Egypt. There was no dominant player in 1000 B.C., though one could make a case for Sidon, Lebanon. In 500 B.C., it would be Persepolis, Persia; in the year 1, Rome; around A.D. 500, maybe Changan, China; in 1000, Kaifeng, China; in 1500, probably Florence, Italy; in 2000, New York City; and in 2500, probably none of the above.

Today Kaifeng is grimy and poor, not even the provincial capital and so minor it lacks even an airport. Its sad state only underscores how fortunes change. In the 11th century, when it was the capital of Song Dynasty China, its population was more than one million. In contrast, London’s population then was about 15,000.

An ancient 17-foot painted scroll, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing, shows the bustle and prosperity of ancient Kaifeng. Hundreds of pedestrians jostle each other on the streets, camels carry merchandise in from the Silk Road, and teahouses and restaurants do a thriving business.

Kaifeng’s stature attracted people from all over the world, including hundreds of Jews. Even today, there are some people in Kaifeng who look like other Chinese but who consider themselves Jewish and do not eat pork.

As I roamed the Kaifeng area, asking local people why such an international center had sunk so low, I encountered plenty of envy of New York. One man said he was arranging to be smuggled into the U.S. illegally, by paying a gang $25,000, but many local people insisted that China is on course to bounce back and recover its historic role as world leader.

“China is booming now,” said Wang Ruina, a young peasant woman on the outskirts of town. “Give us a few decades and we’ll catch up with the U.S., even pass it.”

She’s right. The U.S. has had the biggest economy in the world for more than a century, but most projections show that China will surpass us in about 15 years, as measured by purchasing power parity.

So what can New York learn from a city like Kaifeng?

One lesson is the importance of sustaining a technological edge and sound economic policies. Ancient China flourished partly because of pro-growth, pro-trade policies and technological innovations like curved iron plows, printing and paper money. But then China came to scorn trade and commerce, and per capita income stagnated for 600 years.

A second lesson is the danger of hubris, for China concluded it had nothing to learn from the rest of the world - and that was the beginning of the end.

I worry about the U.S. in both regards. Our economic management is so lax that we can’t confront farm subsidies or long-term budget deficits. Our technology is strong, but American public schools are second-rate in math and science. And Americans’ lack of interest in the world contrasts with the restlessness, drive and determination that are again pushing China to the forefront.

Beside the Yellow River I met a 70-year-old peasant named Hao Wang, who had never gone to a day of school. He couldn’t even write his name - and yet his progeny were different.

“Two of my grandsons are now in university,” he boasted, and then he started talking about the computer in his home.

Thinking of Kaifeng should stimulate us to struggle to improve our high-tech edge, educational strengths and pro-growth policies. For if we rest on our laurels, even a city as great as New York may end up as Kaifeng-on-the-Hudson.

From The NewYork Times

在《纽约时报》瞎看新闻时，发现22日一篇以中文标题发表的文章，名称为《从开封到纽约–辉煌如过眼烟云(Glory is as ephemeral as smoke and clouds)》，这在以英文为主体的国际报纸上，还是相当罕见的（个人判断）。作者为著名专栏作家克里斯托夫 (Nicholas D. Kristof)。

那么纽约应该从开封身上吸取哪些教训呢？
第一，保持科技领先和合理的经济政策极为重要。古代中国繁荣的原因之一，是采用促进经济和贸易的政策，在铁犁、印刷术、纸币等方面进行技术革新。当然古代中国对贸易和商业不够重视。
第二，傲慢自大非常危险。古代中国曾认为无需向外国学习任何东西，这是衰败的开始。
在上述这两个方面，我都很为美国担心。美国目前经济管理松懈，无法解決农产品贴补或长期预算赤字等问题，美国科技虽然处于强势，但目前中小学生的数学和科学属于二流水平，美国人对外国缺乏兴趣，与毫不松懈、生机勃勃、意志坚定的中国人形成鲜明对照。

Microsoft Corp. held a meeting to present the Xbox 360 in Tokyo on May 13, 2005. The company only showed an Xbox 360 mockup. It was almost as large as a small desktop PC. Teams in Japan and the US jointly designed the new Xbox. It is said to have been the Japanese team, who suggested green illumination used in the power button on the front surface. As it was a mockup, part on the back surface of the chassis, where connectors to peripherals such as a display are supposed to be plugged, was left vacant.

The Xbox 360 features a multicore microprocessor integrating three PowerPC cores, 1 MB secondary cache memory and other processors. The operating frequency is 3.2 GHz. System-floating point performance reaches 115.2 GFLOPS, approximately 80 times 1.466 GFLOPS achieved by the first-generation Xbox. Each PowerPC core is equipped with VMX-128 units, which are capable of SIMD computation using 128-bit registers. A VMX-128 register is capable of 128 entries. Each PowerPC core features two VMX-128 units to process two threads in parallel.

The operating frequency of the graphics LSI in it, co-developed with ATI Technologies, Inc., is 500 MHz. It integrates 10 MB DRAM. Polygon performance is said to extend to 500 million triangles per second, about four times that of the conventional Xbox. The pixel fill rate is 16 Gpixels per second.

The data transfer rate of the microprocessor’s I/O interface reaches 21.6 GB/s, approximately 20 times that of the conventional Xbox, while the data rate of the primary memory interface is 22.4 GB/s, 3.5 times that of the Xbox.

From NikkeiBP

似乎这年头转个360度才叫COOL,Yahoo如此，Microsoft也不示弱…
微软于美国当地时间2005年5月12日晚在音乐娱乐频道“MTV”的30分钟特别节目中，公开了新一代Xbox。其名称为“Xbox 360”。并预定2005年底在北美、欧洲和日本等地开始上市。
从外观上看，与小型台式机相差无几(据说造型由日美联合设计小组联手设计)，采用与新一代PS2一样的竖置方式(旧系列Xbox为横卧方式)，虽然展示的外壳颜色为白色，但是据称可通过更换面板，将Xbox 360的外壳更换成蓝色等颜色。
主机内采用集成3个PowerPC内核与1MB二级缓存的多内核架构微处理器,工作频率3.2GHz，浮动小数点运算性能高达115.2GFLOPS，与1.466GFLOPS的第一代“Xbox”相比，处理性能提高了约80倍。为了并行处理2个线程，Xbox 360配备了2组采用128位寄存器、可进行SIMD运算的“VMX-128”的单元,该单元的寄存器入口数为128个。
与加拿大ATI科技公司联合开发的图像处理芯片的工作频率为500MHz。集成了10MB DRAM显存。多边形绘图性能相当于现行Xbox的约4倍，每秒可描述5亿个多边形。像素填充率为16G像素/秒。 微处理器输入输出接口的数据传输速度为21.6GB/秒，相当于Xbox的约20倍。与内存之间的接口传输速度为22.4GB/秒，约为Xbox的3.5倍。
采用DVD-ROM光驱，内置的“Media Center Extender”功能，能够访问家中安装“Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005”操作系统的电脑。可在Xbox 360上播放电脑上保存的电视节目、数码照片，以及音乐文件等内容。
看着以上这些技术参数，我的第一感觉，这还是个游戏机吗？先别说跟台式机相差无几的大小已是最恶外，为了玩趟游戏，甚至还要花比自家PC还贵，配置还高档的东东带回家，不对，是抱回家，心里怎么也觉得有点不舒坦…
我不是反对游戏越做越华丽，主机越做越迅速，只是一直坚信未来既是网络，网络既是终端。把这么一个笨重的，功能还较单一的，价格还不便宜的家伙，或者更抽象的说应用成本，推至到最终用户这边，实在是个不怎么样的idea…

The all-stock deal, announced Monday, is designed to create a better-stocked source of tools for building and distributing multimedia content across a range of operating systems and devices, the companies said. They also stressed that the merger will enable them to expand more rapidly into the market for audio and video applications for handhelds and other gadgets.

In a conference call, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the buyout creates a more robust company capable of delivering new technology into a number of emerging markets.

“This acquisition strengthens Adobe’s mission of helping people and organizations communicate better,” Chizen said. “Whether it is documents, images, the Web, TV or new wireless and other non-PC devices, the methods we use to access this information continue to evolve.”

Market reaction to the deal was mixed. In morning trading, Adobe was down $7.22, or 12 percent, to $53.44. Macromedia was up $2.55, or 8 percent, to $36.

Adobe is best known for its PDF, or Portable Document Format, technology for presenting text files online. Macromedia’s flagship product is the Flash animation software.

From CNET

The earliest adopters in America already have theirs, those black slabs of glistening black plastic and metal.

Some traveled to Japan, where they were released in December,
to buy one. Others paid resellers premium prices - sometimes more than twice their $250 retail price - to call them their own before their arrival in stores in North America in two weeks.

The object of desire is Sony’s PlayStation Portable, a hand-held video gaming device aimed at redefining entertainment on the go - and not just for young gamers.

For Sony, which has faltered in recent years in some electronics categories it once dominated, it is a big bet. The company often refers to the PlayStation Portable, the descendant of the original PlayStation, born 10 years ago, as the first truly integrated portable entertainment system.

Besides playing a new class of interactive 3-D games on its 4.3-inch liquid-crystal-display screen, the PlayStation Portable can play full-length movies, music videos, home movies and digital snapshots with startling clarity.

With the tap of a couple of well-placed buttons, the device is a high-fidelity digital music player complete with gleaming white ear buds.

Nintendo, the industry leader with its line of Game Boy portable gaming devices, has long appealed to younger players, the silvery dual-screen Nintendo DS, which came out late last year, has not attracted hordes of adult players, it adding that most adults shy away from portables.

Sony has not been shy about its desire to appeal first to consumers 18 to 34 years old, and then to younger teenagers and children. In recent months the company has promoted the device’s nongaming extras with almost as much fervor as its high-end gaming features, like built-in Wi-Fi for wireless ad hoc gaming with anyone within 100 feet and online gaming at Wi-Fi hot spots.

From The NewYork Times

它们是一个闪着黑色塑料金属光泽的类似平板的东西，一些04年12月份来日本的游客，为了能早于北美两周以后的发售，甚至以高于正常销售价格250美元两倍的价格而拥有他们。
这就是索尼公司携带式PlayStation-PSP(PlayStation Portable),一个可以玩游戏，看电影，听音乐，并且不再是单纯只为年轻的娱乐者，对于曾经在电子领域一度称霸的索尼，这是一个未来的赌注！
凭借Game Boy系列在手掌机领先的任天堂，由于新机种DS迟于PSP发售，虽有双屏幕，似乎并没有在这新的一轮主机站中占上风。
现在在秋叶原，PSP仍然是一个稀物，出产量赶不上购买量。
说个实在话，我在游戏专门店门口看那些摆着供试玩的机器，第一入眼的还是PSP,虽然DS就在他旁边，没别的，感觉就一个字：酷！
虽然我很讨厌索尼，很欣赏DS的触摸棒想法。