In the next couple of years, we will increasingly see the evidence that Indian IT is not just about providing low-cost resources but will become a major source of innovation too.

I mentioned in a previous post here that I recently met up with Pradipta Bagchi, the head of global communications for India’s number one IT company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Bagchi talked about a couple of new services TCS is developing which I think have enormous potential and could shake up a few western IT vendors.

The first is based on what will be India’s largest supercomputer. TCS has build a system composed entirely of standard commodity hardware and software, and plans to rent access to its processing power, initially in education but also to other sectors.

The aim is to establish a utility-style computing service, with power purchased on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s a concept that has been around for some time, and suppliers such as Sun Microsystems have experimented with it with limited success. It’s also similar to the cloud computing offerings from the likes of Amazon.

But it’s being put together using the same low-cost approach that India has brought to IT services – and it’s that which makes it an interesting proposition.

The second development Bagchi mentioned is along similar lines in that it will be a cloud-type offering, but extends into software applications.

TCS plans to provide a full stack of business applications – from accounting through to supply chain and CRM, plus office tools such as wordprocessing and spreadsheets – on a hosted or software-as-a-service basis.

All the applications are being developed in-house by TCS – no expensive or complicated licensing issues to resolve – but interestingly they will initially be targeted at small business in India, not the traditional western markets.

Indian small businesses are light years behind in their use of IT, and the TCS services offer them a rapid helping hand to IT-enabled productivity.

Once the concept has been proved, you can bet the service will be rolled out internationally.

Again, it’s not a hugely new idea – take Salesforce.com, add Netsuite and Google Apps, and you have something comparable. But the difference is providing services from a single source that you would otherwise have to take from those three companies – and doing so on that familiar Indian low-cost model.

The more globalised the Indian IT suppliers become, the more they are willing to take ideas from the West, adapt them, add to them, innovate with them, and sprinkle in a mix of the country’s unique advantages. They are fast learners – and UK IT will have to learn just as fast if it is to compete.

The public response to the 10 Downing Street e-petitions site instigated by Tony Blair has led to politicians becoming eager to connect with the common man and woman on the street through the web.

After more than one million people signed up to an e-petition against road pricing, the government seemed to be swayed and apparently backed down in the light of such a vociferous – if well-orchestrated – protest.

Subsequently, prime minister Gordon Brown has talked about using e-petitions as a parliamentary tool to bring the voice of the people into the House of Commons (surely that’s what MPs are meant to do, but that’s another matter…).

Measures have been discussed to say that e-petitions gathering sufficient votes will be brought before select committees of MPs for consideration – the Tories have gone even further, suggesting full parliamentary debates over the highest-profile issues raised through this new form of online democracy.

And next week, the Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth will discuss the use of e-petitions as a means for the public to veto unpopular legislation.

Strangely, someone beat MPs to the punch by nearly 40 years– before even the internet was born or Sir Tim Berners-Lee had heard of the word “hyperlink”.

In 1970, British comedy genius Peter Cook – doyen of Private Eye and half of Pete ‘n’ Dud (and Derek and Clive for the more X-rated humourists among you) – starred in a little-known and little-watched movie called The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.

In the film – shown on television only three times according to the IMDB web site -  Cook plays the eponymous hero, a wildly-successful advertising executive who turns his devious skills to politics.

Rimmer soon becomes prime minister after promising the electorate – who have become disconnected from politics and distrustful of MPs – that new technology will allow them all to have a say in the running of the country.

Rimmer introduces voting through the television – a national electronic referendum on every parliamentary debate. The people love it – for a while.

As more and more tedious procedural votes interrupt their favourite soaps and sitcoms, public enthusiasm for the move evaporates. Rimmer, ever the populist leader, offers a solution: One last vote – to make him the first president of Great Britain, with executive decision-making responsibility for all those boring votes.

The movie closes on a freeze frame of Rimmer’s face, the look in his eyes betraying the successful conclusion of his long-standing plan.

So, e-petitions, eh? Be careful what you want, you just might get it…

Happy 10th birthday to Google – an event celebrated by the creation of thousands more web pages about Google that Google can search for you. So here’s another one – 10 nice and nasty things about the most influential web site in the world.

Nice: The simplicity

At the heart of Google’s success is the elimination of complexity and those awful cluttered portals that we used in the early days of the web. A clean white screen, with a simple white box, and beyond it is everything you need to find on the internet. This has been perhaps the biggest factor in Google’s success, and also a critical element of making the web the global phenomenon it has become. Google has eliminated techno-fear among the masses and brought the complex nature of the internet to a non-technically aware audience.

Nasty: Advertising dominance

Google is still trumpeted as the anti-Microsoft, but how long before its dominance of the online search advertising market makes it a target for the same enemies of monopolism that dragged Microsoft through the courts? Google’s growing share of global advertising spend – in all forms – is changing the media landscape, and not always for the better.

Nice: Do no evil

Google’s corporate motto promised a new era of compassionate capitalism, and even when it entered the stock market the company’s off-the-wall approach to its dealings with Wall Street pleased users and shareholders alike.

Nasty: China

Human rights activists such as Amnesty International are still up in arms about Google’s acceptance of censorship for its Chinese web site. Critics say that the internet is such a force for good in human rights that to accede to the wishes of a repressive regime makes a mockery of Google’s good intentions elsewhere.

Nice: All the world’s information

Google’s stated aim to “organise the world’s information” offers the ultimate democratisation of knowledge and learning. At its simplest, how handy is it to resolve those arguments or remember those half-forgotten song lyrics in seconds with a Google search? One of the most-used phrases by web users the world over must be: “What did we do before Google?”

Nasty: Copyright and intellectual property infringement

Google has trodden on plenty of toes with plans to digitise books, reproduce news content, and the availability of copyrighted content on YouTube. Accessing all the world’s information is a great thing – but much of that content does actually belong to people, many of whom make a living out of it.

Nice: Larry and Sergey

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have managed to combine the geek-made-good image of Bill Gates with the coolness of Steve Jobs – but avoided the monopolist criticisms made of Microsoft’s founder and the smugness of Apple’s chief. Two smart guys with a bright idea who made good – everything Silicon Valley was meant to be about.

Nasty: Eric Schmidt

Google’s chief executive is the man who brings cold-hearted capitalism to the wacky Googlisms. Schmidt is the corporate rottweiler, there to stand up to Microsoft’s pitbull chief executive Steve Ballmer. And his background at Novell – a company that never recovered from Microsoft taking over its established market – means there is a score to settle with Redmond.

Nice: Free software

Free wordprocessing, free spreadsheets, free email, free web browser, free video – Google is not afraid to invest the billions it makes from advertising into a blatant attempt to change the software industry and slowly destroy Microsoft’s cash cows. The products aren’t perfect – but they are generally good enough, and if concerns over security and quality can be overcome, Google could lead the computing world into the cloud.

Nasty: Data collection

The biggest threat to Google’s future are the growing concerns over privacy, data protection and the use of our personal information. Just what exactly does Google do with all the information it compiles about each of us from our search profiles? How much can it learn by scanning the contents of our Gmails? And as more people use Google Apps to store personal documents and financial spreadsheets, what is being done to allay Big Brother fears over correlation of disparate data sources and how  much marketing and advertising firms can find out about us? Microsoft knows this is its rivals weak spot, and the next version of Internet Explorer will include a function to prevent historic search data from being collected by Google.

What do you think? Let us know your top likes and dislikes about Google and join in the 10th birthday fun…

Private Eye brought us an insight into the world of Google-chasing last week.

The satirical magazine and media-baiter revealed the “secrets of the Telegraph’s online success” after the newspaper claimed to have became the most-read daily paper on the web.

To quote from the Private Eye story: “News hacks [at the Daily Telegraph] are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the web site boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first paragraph of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘breast cancer’, hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women ‘such as Britney Spears’ being at risk from breast cancer.”

This sort of behaviour – relentlessly and shamelessly chasing the maximum number of hits from Google searches or Google News – is one of the unspoken facets of the internet news age.

From an editor’s point of view, one of the great things about the web is that you can track precisely what stories are being read and which are not. It is valuable information to understand the topics that matter to our audience – but some web sites take it to the sort of extreme described above.

In the IT world, if Computing were to publish more stories featuring Linux, Apple, open source product names, Microsoft product names, virus names, music downloads, iTunes or iPods – among others – it would comfortably provide a boost to our page impressions. The fact that we don’t reflects our desire to serve the needs of our target audience –senior IT decision-makers in the UK, whose interests lie in best practice technology implementations, case studies, market intelligence, skills and careers issues, leadership, management and how technology relates to the key business issues of the day.

If we really went hell-for-leather for hits, we could work in the occasional mention of Britney Spears or UFOs or Kate Moss. I’m sure Britney and Kate own a PC, so there’s bound to be an IT angle. In fact, I bet they own a trendy Mac, so double those hits.

The internet has been great for journalism – and more importantly for readers – but a future of Google-chasing strategies benefits nobody.

Readers would end up with the same old re-hashed stories about the same old topics, with little differentiation or editorial agenda to make them interesting beyond the basic facts. Worse, you would lose the diversity of topics needed to inform, entertain and educate.

For journalists, Google-chasing is the antithesis of good investigative reporting. If a specialist web site breaks a fantastic, exclusive, authoritative, ground-breaking story, Google will largely ignore it because its news selection algorithm assumes that the more web sites are featuring a particular story, the more important it must be. If one site breaks a great exclusive that does not go into the mainstream, it will barely be read. Chasing hits means chasing the stories that rank highest on Google, not necessarily the stories that matter.

And for advertisers – without whom, of course, there would not be the multitude of news sites available on the web – they lose the ability to target potential customers that comes from the in-depth understanding of a particular audience and their unique needs and interests.

If you want to read about reality TV stars and minor celebrities everywhere, the Google-chasing future will be for you. If you prefer bold to bland, diversity to conformity, special interests to special offers, then I hope your needs will be met too.

On the walk from Oxford Circus tube station to the Computing office in London’s Soho, there is a Carphone Warehouse shop. It is normally unremarkable – except today at 9am there was a queue of (mainly male) people outside, apparently eager to be the first to buy the new 3G iPhone, out today.

Well, you might have thought, there’s a popular product. The last times there were queues in Oxford Street were for the opening of a new Primark store and the latest Harry Potter book.

But in this case, there also happened to be a camera crew set up outside the phone shop to film the queue. And another camera crew inside, no doubt waiting to film the “rush” of punters to get their hands on an iPhone.

Hmm. In-demand, or very carefully stage managed? I think the latter.

Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have done a great PR job on the new phone – creating the illusion of massive demand regardless of how many units they will ship.

Newspaper stories this morning claimed that supply was limited to one iPhone per customer, or two per business. Given the big bucks Apple is chasing by establishing the product as an genuine corporate alternative to the BlackBerry, this is hardly likely to be the case.

Imagine the conversation: “Hi Apple, I’m the IT manager at [insert global multinational company]. I’d like to buy 10,000 iPhones please.”

“Sorry Mr Global Multinational. You can only have two.”

Yeah, right.

It’s become classic consumer electronics marketing – create a buzz around a product by making people think everyone is desperate to own one.

In the case of the new iPhone, it probably needs the buzz. After all, the great new features of the second-generation product include 3G connectivity for faster web surfing – already available in, erm, every other product on the market. And an online store of 900 ready-to-download consumer and business applications to help make your smartphone more functional.

Or you could buy a Symbian-based phone and download any of the 9,000-plus applications already developed for that platform.

Oh, and the iPhone costs a bomb.

Perhaps I’ve been in this game too long and the cynicism has set in after seeing too many product launches, but if anything is more likely to turn me off the iPhone – already the most over-hyped technology product in history – it’s the stage-managed artifice surrounding a me-too, catch-up phone.

As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too… 

Computing is attending SAP's Sapphire conference to meet and talk to the software giant's customers. We are, as always, far more interested in the real-life business experience of IT leaders - our readers - than the detail of the technology itself.

But for once, I found myself genuinely impressed by a product demonstration today.

SAP has worked with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to integrate its business applications with the BlackBerry user interface and have created a truly seamless connection between the two.

The demo featured the RIM executive who was presenting going into his BlackBerry calendar, finding a meeting with a customer, then at the click of a button bringing up that customer's history from RIM's corporate SAP software.

It is the first time I have seen a real business-focused innovation in the mobile technology world for some time, and an example of the way that business executives will be using their mobile computers - be they BlackBerrys, phones or smartphones - to really keep up with the organisation away from the office.

Email and calendars are the easy and obvious tools for flexible working, but there has been much less progress made by IT vendors in making the mobile properly a part of the core business applications that actually run the company.

SAP and BlackBerry are onto a winning combination - and an example of what will one day be the norm for business.

In the early 1990s, I was working for ICL – the once and former poster child for UK IT – trying to sell big old mainframes running an operating system called VME (which stood for “virtual machine environment” – remember that, it becomes important later on…).

It wasn’t an entirely successful venture, given that most of the world was moving to mid-range Unix servers and proliferating these cheaper boxes around every department of the organisation.

At the time, I would occasionally come across an IBM customer still hanging on to their dear old water-cooled mainframes. Water cooling! Honestly. So 1970s. Air conditioning – that was the way forward.

Fast forward to this week when, while hosting a Computing web seminar on energy efficient IT, I find the expert speakers telling viewers to consider, um, consolidating departmental servers to one big central box and, err, investigating water cooling for their datacentres instead of energy-hungry air conditioning.

See? The IT industry is a fast-moving, forward-looking, innovative industry. You heard it here first – water-cooled mainframes are the next big thing. And flares.

Oh, and don’t forget the key technology that is driving the server consolidation trend – virtualisation, whereby multiple applications previously hosted on individual boxes are run in virtual servers on a single box, centralised into what you might call a virtual machine environment.

In the spirit of the IT industry’s love of TLAs (three-letter acronyms), let’s now give this technology its own shorthand – virtualisation, after all, being a bit of mouthful. I suggest that from now on, we call it VME.

Sound familiar?

Sometimes it really is true that the best ideas are the old ones. Of course IT, like anything else, goes in cycles and the trends of yesteryear find new popularity once more. Give it 10 years and we’ll have a dot com boom – Business 5.0, perhaps.

Can anyone else think of examples of old technologies and trends that are - or should be - making a renaissance today?

Here’s another one for the real nostalgists – the ICL One-per-desk (OPD), but with a voice over IP interface. It would work…

An OPD yesterday. Or in 1984.

The rumours have finally abated, and what was perhaps the raging inevitability of a Microsoft bid for Yahoo is now a reality.

The software giant today offered nearly $45bn for its internet rival. It also emerged that Yahoo rejected an acquisition approach from Microsoft in February last year, believing that its 2007 turnaround plans and the development of its Project Panama search advertising platform would be the basis for the company’s revival.

But when Yahoo announced earlier this week that annual profit was down 12 per cent, Microsoft decided to strike.

Last year, Yahoo was able to convince shareholders that it had a plan in place to deliver the necessary improvement on its stock price. Just 12 months later, those shareholders may be harder to convince when faced with cashing in on a 62 per cent premium on the current share value for Yahoo.

So, chances are the shareholders will say yes. Certainly it would take a very long-term investor to think they are willing to wait for Yahoo shares to increase 62 per cent.

Then it will come down to the regulators. US and European competition authorities will undoubtedly want to examine the deal.

In the US, Google’s planned acquisition of online advertising firm DoubleClick was closely examined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), before approving the deal in December last year. Microsoft will be heartened by that decision and will expect it to be seen as something of a precedent.

In Europe, the EU Competition Commission has a long and combative relationship with Microsoft over its dominant position in PC software. The commission has also taken a long, hard look at the DoubleClick acquisition, and many experts expect it to follow the FTC’s example.

So, as Microsoft will undoubtedly argue, if a merger between the world’s biggest pay-per-click internet advertiser and the one of the world’s leading online display advertising firms is acceptable, why would there be a problem with the number two and three search engines getting together?

All Microsoft’s official communications about the Yahoo proposal refer to a “dominant” online search advertising firm. Redmond will argue that combining with its rival will increase competition in the market by offering customers an alternative to Google that can match it more closely in user base and market share.

Google, however, is probably already telling regulators that in a market dominated by three companies, taking one of those out is to the detriment of competition. Remember that opposition to the DoubleClick deal in Europe was led by a Microsoft complaint to the EU. Google will seriously consider returning the compliment.

Microsoft will have a battle on its hands to see the acquisition through, but the deal makes sense all round.

So the fight for the online advertising dollar is well and truly underway. Internet ad spend last year was estimated at $40bn – forecasts suggest it will double to $80bn in 2010. Microsoft wants a bigger share of the pie, and the combination with Yahoo is the obvious way to achieve it.

The question marks that remain will be about how well two companies with very different development cultures can integrate. Yahoo and Microsoft have both been left in the lurch at times by the speed of new web trends and technologies – the success of Google Maps, for example. Will more programmers and more research and development cash be enough to close that innovation gap? It’s a hard task, but don’t bet against it.

But the acid test will be what you do – you, the internet user.

If you use Yahoo because you hate Microsoft, will you be driven into the arms of Google? Yahoo has a huge and loyal user base, every single one of whom is just a click away from becoming a Google customer instead.

When Ford bought Volvo, for example, Volvo drivers were unlikely to sell their cars in protest. But loyalty on the internet is a far more ephemeral thing.

We can expect to see Microsoft vs Google as the head-to-head for the internet era. But the winner will not be decided by advertisers, regulators or developers. It will be decided by you.

I’m up on my high horse and going to have a rant now. Just how annoying is the national newspaper coverage of technology? An example earlier this week typified the sort of lazy, negative, narrow-minded, and downright unhelpful sort of articles you see so often.

On Wednesday, The Times, no less, the UK’s most famous and revered newspaper, ran a front-page lead story stating that Microsoft is developing software for “remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.”

In the article, headlined as “Microsoft seeks patent for office spy software” it told how Microsoft is developing this “Big Brother-style software”. The story included a series of quotes from employment and privacy experts not surprisingly stating what an awful and probably illegal thing this would be.

Absolute scare-mongering drivel.

The story was based entirely on a patent application from Microsoft, one of thousands it registers every year. Every major IT firm does the same – HP, IBM and so on – applying for patents that may, or may not, one day lead to actual products.

There is no evidence Microsoft is developing the software, nor that it plans to use the application in the manner described. Indeed, much of the functionality described already exists, and it wouldn’t be that difficult for an enterprising software developer to build a PC to do much of what was described – monitoring heart rates, stress levels, concentration levels, and so on.

This is what journalists call a “child might die” story – one possible outcome of an unlikely sequence of events extrapolated from a minimal series of facts.

Now I know I am on my high horse here, but please don’t get on some of yours in response to this post. I am not a Microsoft apologist, far from it, and I’m not defending Microsoft in any way. And I’m sure there are those readers who could find ways to criticise some of what they read in the specialist IT press too. But what frustrates me no end is to see the way that technology is covered in the national mass media.

It is good news that there is now a national debate on the social impacts of technology. It is bad news for everyone in IT that the underlying tone is based on utter technophobia and the assumption that more technology in our lives is a bad thing.

The one exception seems to be Apple, coverage of which is so fawning that it assumes every idea that comes out of Steve Jobs and his team is amazing, fantastic, unique and earth-shattering.

The same issue of The Times also claimed that “The days of leaving the house to rent a video were declared over yesterday, when Apple announced a new online rental service.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I sort of thought I could already watch pay-as-you go movies on my TV thanks to Virgin Media, my cable provider and the company with the most gob-smackingly awful customer service in the world. Sky has been delivering such a service for even longer, as its millions of Sky Movies Box Office customers will tell you. So, thanks for the innovation, Steve. Even good old BT can give you a set-top box to plug into your broadband connection to download movies.

Given the ubiquity of technology in everyday life, and the increasing popularity of technology among consumers, it would be good to see that reflected more widely than just in an IT advocate publication such as Computing.