Inside the CIO’s mind

CIOs and senior IT decision makers are under intense pressure in the current economic climate. Budget cuts, postponed investments, and hiring freezes combined with CEO expectations to innovate and deliver improved performance put CIOs in a tough spot. 2010 will be another very challenging year for CIOs as they face the need to run lean and efficient IT organizations and, at the same time, to leverage new technologies that enhance business performance and help differentiate the company from competitors.

The core question in every CIO’s mind is what is the purpose of having this IT organization in the center of the company? The response to this question guides them to make the right choices and set the right priorities. Over the past year, I have had an opportunity to get insights into the inner working of the IT organizations of more than 75 large customers across the globe and across various industries. I found that CIOs have a unique vantage point; they sit at the hub of the organization and thus are able to contribute in more powerful ways than their peers in other C-level roles.
While looking for patterns among decision-making criteria and strategic priorities, I observed that, just like our marketing friends, CIOs have 4Ps that are crucial to their success:

• Business Performance
• Employee Productivity
• Sustainable Profitability
• Talented People

 

• Business Performance
  The CIO, by definition, is expected to deploy technology that helps all of the business divisions enhance their performance. Toward this end, they adopt strategies like business intelligence, strengthening of value-chain systems (through ERP, CRM, SRM, etc.), creating or improving strategic applications, and improving IT security and business continuity.
• Employee Productivity
  Here, the core focus is on how to get more value from the employees and available resources. CIOs use strategies such as desktop optimization, messaging, collaboration, web conferencing, VOIP, and mobile access to drive productivity. The CIO also leads the IT organization itself and, in that capacity, must evaluate and choose from strategies like server consolidation, ITIL adoption, and datacenter optimization to enhance the productivity of IT.
• Sustainable Profitability
  To be truly effective, the IT organization must contribute directly to the top or bottom line of the company. Stand-out CIOs use technology to help generate more business from current and new customers, design or enable innovative new products and services, contribute to the creation of new business strategies, and devise ways to use IT to differentiate the company from the competition.
• Talented People
  The CIO cannot achieve his goals alone. He needs to build a strong team and hence invests in capabilities, capacity, and culture. He must ensure that IT staff has opportunities to learn, earn, and grow in their careers.

From a bag that contains hundreds of potential strategies, CIOs pick and choose a handful of them and prioritize them to achieve their goals. How they set those priorities — particularly for spending — depends upon both external forces and internal forces. The external forces include industry environment, industry trends, competition, regulation, and the geopolitical climate. The internal forces include business strategies and objectives, infrastructure maturity, and the maturity of various business capabilities.

To get CIO’s attention and investment, you must have products or services in line with their priority, an ability to have a strategic discussion and a business case to justify ROI/TCO.

Will Newspaper Adapt or Die?

It seems hopeless. How can the Sumo-Newspaper Industry fight with Ninja-Internet? 2009 saw the biggest decline in newspaper profitability in US history. The closure and bankruptcies were in headlines and even prompted senate hearing on the future of the industry. The terror of blogging which provides information from Internet junkies in Pajamas is sending chills up the spine of the Industry. The attack is coming from many directions. News is expected to be free on the Internet, which attacks the printed newspaper sales revenue, while the classified advertisement revenue is under attack from sites like Craigslist, Oodle etc. The impression advertisement is also losing battle to online advertisements. So far, online coupons sites have not been effectively able to challenge the Sunday Newspaper coupons. But the upcoming mobile Apps are challenging that frontier too.

Ten years ago, it was a challenge for websites to get people to spend time for pleasure in front of a computer screen. Today, the problem is to get people under 50 or so to pick up a newspaper. Today a very few people aged between 12 and 25 ever read newspaper, but they spend a lot of time online, watch TV, play video games, use mobile phone apps and do web surfing on mobile devices.

The recent 42% fall in printed classified ads revenue and 30% fall in printed newspaper revenue shook the industry. On the contrary growing online advertisement sales created mega companies like Google. However, online newspaper revenues are grossly below the sustainable levels and growth is not even promising enough to even substitute today’s anemic revenue numbers over the next 5 years. Consequently, over 12,000 journalists have lost their jobs since 2007, according to Columbia Journalism Review. In the context of life science, Darwin is famed for his quotation – we all must adapt or die. This has proven right even in the business world over the last few centuries which is evident by the churn of companies in Dow and S&P 500.

The situation is similar to a burning platform, so the key challenge is not willingness to change but clarity of future state of the Industry and sense of urgency. The gloomy outlook is not universal – in some countries, such as India, the newspaper continues to dominate the media landscape, as Internet penetration remains merely 7.1% and only 50% of households own a TV. Is it just matter of time until the industry switches fully to the internet or is it already too late?

The Geek Mime

Just a decade ago, had you ever imagined people with Bluetooth earplugs talking to their friends about tabloid gossip or business secrets at public places like airports, malls and restaurants? What you see today is people talking to thin air, seeming much like a lunatic of the last century.

Then you guess that they may be talking over their cell phones.
Imagine the future cell phone with more computing power than today’s computers, with a wireless connection to an interactive chip on the lens of your eyeglasses, which will not only display information for you, but also track your eye movements, your hand gestures, and interpret these commands like Project Natal.

Technically, this is feasible today .By projecting images from your eyeglasses on to your retina, you will see an image several feet in front of you.

Now to this you add gesture recognition and interpretation from Microsoft’s project Natal. Just imagine what will you look like replying to an email with these data glasses and using hand gesture at an airport ?

Internet of 2020

Why blog about the Internet? Each individual may have their own reasoning, but I simply can’t live without it. For many of my friends, the withdrawal symptoms from the Internet are worse than abstaining from smoking or alcohol. I know that it is just a series of interconnected machines that are exchanging data packets, but still I cannot live without it.
The Internet is very young- seeded in 1962, but officially born in 1992. In early 2008, Vinton Cerf, the father of the internet, participated in the landing of a robot on the Martian North Pole – the first rover to carry communication protocols, protocols that expanded the Internet to interplanetary proportions. While NASA is spending billions extending the Internet to Mars, down here on Earth, I am still experiencing slow downloads of movies from Netflix.

I hope that the recently allocated $7.2 billion of stimulus money under American Recovery & Reinvestment Act to support the development of broadband capabilities across US will allow for a much faster and richer Internet surfing experience. A couple of years ago, many people started feeling that we already had enough processing power for email, Word and downloading YouTube videos, so that we no longer needed to upgrade. That reminded me of the famous quote from Charles H. Duell, commissioner of US patent office, “Everything that can be invented has been invented”. This perception and two consecutive recessions in a short period led to the stifling of investments in the Internet infrastructure in USA. But as more investments go in and more capabilities come online, a whole new set of new scenarios will come about which have not been envisioned yet. Who would have envisioned Xbox Live multiplayer games, multi-touch Windows, Project Natal, HD videos on YouTube, the iPod and iTunes just a decade or two ago? John D’Ambrosia of IEEE forecasted that Ethernet speed will be in terabit range by 2015.To put things in perspective, with 1 Gbps, I can download one hour of video in 16 seconds, and with 1 Tbps, it will be instantaneous. This kind of bandwidth can enable many new scenarios.

The frequent travelling that executives require to stay connected with their global operations will become less common as the Internet’s potential is developed. Technologies like tele-presence, tele-conferencing and virtual events will be more lifelike and provide a greater user experience. With the recent launch of 3D PC along with Windows 7, we can soon expect to have 3D TV and gaming in our living rooms.

MIT has been posting lectures on YouTube for years, and now professors at Carnegie Mellon have started digitally teaching classes at satellite campuses. Videoconferencing is maturing, as doctors have started monitoring patients around the clock at patients’ homes and as patients can now use video conferencing to reach out to medical specialist on-need basis. One of the most discussed such stories on the Internet is that of Benjamin Burg, a Hawaiian heart specialist who dictated complicated surgery over the Internet to a Guam man across 3500 miles. During this entire procedure, Berg was constantly monitoring every move and vital statistics from sensors in the patient’s heart. Windows Media Center and extender technology allows you to play media from your PC on to your TV. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a scenario when you will be able to record video using a Flip camera or cell phone and stream that directly to your friend’s TV. The Internet usage is going to multiply over the next few years.

The Internet connectivity evolved from wired connectivity – just a couple of decades ago – to wireless connectivity, and to mobile Internet connectivity. The Internet as we know it connects 1 billion users, is reaching out to 2.5 billion cell phone users, and soon to even more people through devices like the TV. The mix of text, images, audio, and video in this high-volume traffic will also change at a fast pace, creating new business processes, models and jobs.

In the short term, USA has to catch up with the much more developed networks of Japan, South Korea, and other Asian countries. In 2007, the median US broadband speed was 5 Mbps, as compared to 63 Mbps in Japan and 49Mbps in South Korea. Research has shown a correlation between broadband reach & speed with economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation and quality of life. Unfortunately, such growth may also come at a cost as it accelerates disruptive forces which for example, can decimate newspaper and print media industries. The players in these industries will have to adapt to the “new economy” or face bankruptcies. These technological changes are like hundred year floods – some companies will drown, and some will be catching more fish.
In addition to the improvement in broadband speed, the Internet will become smarter as technical innovations of Internet infrastructure starts driving new business models like cloud computing, virtual healthcare and Individualized mass education. As these business models start taking root, they will start putting pressure on the organizational models, which in turn may evolve to become more widely distributed, and at the same time, more collaborative. Of course, the way we interact with the government is going to evolve very fast. The definition of privacy and safety will evolve as we understand the challenges of identity theft, corporate espionage and the government watching our every move.

The extreme flexibility of the Internet makes long term predictions very difficult even for a professional futurist. Even though I want to predict that by 2020 there will be more Internet connected devices than the human population, but I know that vast majority of the Internet’s uses and applications have not been envisioned yet. Based on the pace of new ideas, standards, inventions and innovations it is hard to predict the vast majority of applications that we will be using in 2020.

But one thing is certain –the future of the Internet is our future. Are you ready for it?

Industry Architecture

Current economic turmoil has prompted radical changes in rules and roles of various industries. As the industry architectures adjust themselves to respond to the recession, many industry leaders will be reduced to industry laggards, while many newcomers will capitalize this opportunity to become giants. This is not a new phenomenon as all sectors evolve over time and their industry architecture reshapes, but they do it at different pace and at different time cycles.

However, today we are living through a unique time in several ways. Not only is this recession probably, the worst since the Second World War, but it also caught us by surprise.

So much for the bad news. The silver lining to the cloud is that a better understanding of the industry architecture will help us to understand the opportunities and pitfalls in the current times. This crisis could be a wakeup call, showing us how some companies manage industry architecture to their advantage and how some industries are dangerously unstable. Armed with this insight companies can take advantage of the opportunities presented by this downturn to reshape companies and even sectors.

So what is Industry Architecture and why does it matter?
Industry architecture consists of roles played by companies in a sector and the rules (standards, regulations and conventions) that connect them.

These roles, rules and relationships define the way in which money is made i.e. companies business model. They influence “who does what” (Strategic choices and what each role is in the industry) – which in turn determines “who takes what” (revenue, market share, competitive advantage and profit). However, they are not static – they change substantially over time.

Consider early days of computing, where the industry unbundled, vertically disintegrated, changing the competitive dynamics and even the identity of the sector. IBM outsourced too much during the 1980s giving up critical business functions. Meanwhile, Apple of late 1980s was too integrated and closed losing the battle for personal computing and allowing previously unknown companies to capture the key parts of its value proposition. Both companies came close to failure.
Microsoft, by contrast, used creative agreements to maintain its position as a key stone, retaining the key parts of computing value-added process and guaranteeing a foothold in the critical area of graphical user interface, operating system and pre-installed software. Crafting and excellently executing on these strategies including OEM strategy made Microsoft a household name. Companies such as Microsoft do not just work in a sector – they work on it, shaping the sector and ensuring that the future of the industry will fit their capabilities. IBM and Apple’s more recent history suggests that they too managed to overcome their previous failure by becoming more savvy managers of their sectors architecture.

Consider financial services for instance. Over the past decade, we have seen new instruments (securitized loans and later collateralized debt obligations), new rules (often prompted by the companies and individuals who stood to benefit from them) and new models (various types of hedge funds). These changes transformed the way money was made and created new winners: securitizes in the beginning of the decade, hedge funds and private equity shortly thereafter and (until the collapse) and their employees.

What is interesting about the industry architectures is that they often change without us noticing. This term Industry architecture was coined in 2006 by Michael G Jacobides, associate professor of strategic and international management at London business school. Since nobody is meant to monitor them, industry architectures can lead to boom or bust or both. If you take a step back and get a sense of the entire system, you might see the risks and opportunities. But if you do not, you might step into the meltdown. For instance, each successive change in financial services was eminently sensible in isolation, but their cumulative impact was disastrous and someone should have foreseen it.

Consider the increasingly untenable position of large telecommunications operator, which have been challenged by new ways of making money and having to reposition themselves constantly vis-à-vis content providers, handset manufacturers and service providers.

Rethink your role, reshape the architecture
As downturn became recession and credit evaporated, other industry architectures are up for grabs. Recessions cause transformations in the way we do business. The 1970s downturn gave European and US Manufacturers the chance to change their practices and re-organize their supply chain. The early 1990s recession helped spur the growth of outsourcing. And the IT slump at the start of this decade ushered in a new type of networked organization and flexible workers.

When sectors are growing, everyone is busy making money. They carry on doing what they have always done, even if it is inefficient, and nobody wants to voice any doubts or change the sector. But when the going gets tough, companies are willing consider entirely new ways of doing business and established leaders may be unable to prevent changes in the structure of their sector.

Consider the UK construction sector, which was stable for decades and inefficient for a very long time. New ideas such as “design for build ability” and “design for cost minimization” only took hold when the 1990s recession forced existing players to change the structures and span more parts of the value chain in order to survive.
Crisis means new industry architectures. That means new opportunities for those who can adapt and challenges for those who think that a downturn can only mean lower output, lay-offs and retrenchment. Customer needs are different in a downturn: consumption shifts from an aspirational, image-driven model to an emphasis on thrift and value, as we can see from the spike in sales of low-price retail chains such as Wal-Mart, Aldi and Lidl over the Christmas period in US and Europe.

Business-to-business relations are being redrawn, shifting the focus from growth to preserving cash. Capital markets are pre-occupied with risk. And regulators are aiming for corporate survival at all costs, where once they sought competition. This is why downturns are associated with rapid changes in a sector’s pecking order – a threat for those at the top and an opportunity for those hungry for success.

So what should companies do?
Adapting to a new reality, changing the way you do business or reshaping your industry’s architecture is no mean feat. First, you need to work out how you can add value in the new environment. This requires realigning what the company does to match emerging needs. It means reconsidering how the organization is structured, and how its financial and capital structure translates success into results.

To do this, you must clearly express why and how a company can add value, and explain how it can continue doing so as the downturn deepens and conditions change. You have to decide how to reposition the company in the sector, distinguishing between temporary lulls and profound clinical changes, and consider what could be tenable in the future. You need to plan for the worst while plotting your course to emerge stronger from this difficult period.

The phenomenon of adjusting to industry architecture and redefining industry architecture is not new. This can be done in good times or in turmoil like today. For instance Merrill Lynch (in USA) launched its cash management account back in 1978. This combined traditionally separate banking products such as line of credit, check, investment and equity accounts into a single monthly statement, with idle funds being swept automatically into a high-interest-bearing account. The new accounts attracted US$1 billion of assets in first year. Merrill Lynch set out to change the shape of the financial marketplace permanently by taking several existing but separate services and tying them together through information technology to create a new service that shattered the traditional boundaries between the banking and securities industries.
In another instance, in 1980s Otis Elevators, the US manufacturer of elevators, identified ‘customer services’ as being a key element of its customer strategy to overcome the price wars. It decided that one of the aspects of its service that would give its customers most satisfaction was a prompt lift repair service. So, it built an automated system, called Otisline, to dispatch repairmen. Where something started to go wrong with Otis’s lifts, they (the lifts!) automatically called in their complaint to a computer – without human intervention. Otis’ rivals suddenly had to compete on quality of service as well as the price and quality of lifts themselves.

Thinking about the industry architecture can also help to dispel the doomy introspection that accompanies downturns. In tough times, everyone looks inwards, obsessing over redundancies, politics and re-organization – losing touch with customers and the market just when they can least afford to. Finding a way to refocus on value, on what lies behind the financial results, could help to combat this dangerous tendency. It could be just the challenge you need to energize and awaken the talent in your business and restructure company and your sector.

Companies that have the courage to do so, do much more than manage their operations & costs to return to profitability. They identify which parts of their business are viable and which are not, taking the crisis as an opportunity to take a strategic look at their future and that of their sector. We know that companies do not change unless they are forced to, and managers have used “burning platforms” as an opportunity reorganize from time immemorial. The good news is that no one needs convincing that the platform is burning. The flames are around our ears. What is important now is not to let good crisis go waste.

Bing.com – A Decision Engine

By now, Microsoft clearly understands that world doesn’t need another search engine and it understands how Google makes money on its search engine. It is a multibillion-dollar market, and Microsoft wants to have a slice of the cake. So Microsoft is positioning Bing as a decision engine, renaming Virtual Earth to Bing Maps and making “Farecast technology” part of Bing Travel. Microsoft is also making the mobile edition available for cell phones and other mobile devices at m.bing.com.

Bing - A Decision Engine

With the aim of leading users to more confident decisions, Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing:
1. Deliver great results
2. Deliver a more organized experience
3. Simplify tasks and provide insight

Bing also innovates on core search areas such as:

• Entity extraction and expansion
• Query intent recognition
• Document summarization technology
• New user-experience model that adapts to query types to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
• Deep Links – allows more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer
• Quick Preview – a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the site’s relevancy
• One-click access to information through Instant Answers
• Preview videos in the search without having to visit YouTube directly

In nutshell, this is an attempt is to make Bing well suited for task-centric searches. Many users are impressed by the progress, while Matt Cutts of Google may not be impressed yet. Only time will tell.

Some of the key differentiators from Google are:

• Searches for videos – returns clips that can be watched by simply moving your mouse over the results.
• Cash back – when you buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links.
• Related searches – Shown in the upper left hand side of the results page
• Travel related searches – searches like “Seattle to NY” return a ticket price at the top of the results.

There is a huge focus on Travel, as Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare. Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options and 17 percent spend more than a month.

Bing Travel’s key features include the following:

• Price Predictor – Bing Travel predicts whether the price of a flight is going up or down.
• Rate Indicator – Bing analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all.
• Travel Deals – Bing Travel shows the best airfare and hotel deals it has and will even show why particular flights are considered deals.
• Comparison Flight & Hotel Search – Bing Travel allows refining results quickly: nonstop flights only, specific airlines, hotels within a mile of an address, and many more.
• Fare Alerts – Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.
• Original travel editorial content – Bing Travel combines editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts

Microsoft is finally rising to the search engine challenge. Steve Ballmer publically announced his goal of making Bing second most popular search engine in next 5 years. Data issued by Stat Counter on Thursday June 4th 2009, showed that the goal had already been achieved:

• Google: 71.47 percent
• Bing: 16.28 percent
• Yahoo: 10.22 percent

Bing - Stat Counter Global Stats

On a global basis, the company said it saw a similar trend:

• Google: 87.62 percent
• Bing: 5.62 percent
• Yahoo: 5.13 percent

Just for fun, try to search the following on www.Bing.com

• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo
• Any other company

All of this is good, now show me the money . Before Google’s debut, all the websites owners were trying to bring people to their web site and keep them on the site. Longer the user stayed on the site, more money site owner made by showing more advertisements. AOL, Yahoo, MSN were all in the same boat. Then came Google. Google makes money when you leave their site. The sooner you click on one of the sponsored links, the faster Google makes money.

Now that you understand the incentive, let’s talk about the behaviors that this incentive drives. Now it has become more important for Google to show you the most relevant advertisements rather than the most relevant search results. This makes the quality of search results a second priority.

To focus on the first priority, Google democratized the advertiser market and brought mom and pop owners to the same level as large corporations by allowing everyone to bid for search words on a level playing field. With these 10’s of millions of advertisers and 100’s of millions of search words up for auction, Google spends most of its efforts and energy on relevance of advertisement rather than search quality.

Yahoo and Microsoft have been evolving on the Search relevance with a hope to catch up with Google, but the main battle is yet to be fought in terms of acquiring the paying advertisers, as these advertisers bring the money to the table.

It once seemed inevitable that Google would forever rule the world of search, but Microsoft and Yahoo are not yet vanquished. Will Microsoft’s knight in shining armor – Bing – prove mightier? Or is the world forever fated to use Google?

 

What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts here…

Google Wave

 What is Google Wave? It is a new communication service that Google unveiled at Google IO this week. It is a product, platform and protocol for communication and collaboration designed for today’s world. Is that too much of technical jargon…let’s make it simple…and take it in chewable bite size…

It is like reinventing email that was designed 40 years ago i.e. many years before internet, wiki, blogs, twitter, forums, discussion boards etc existed. The world has evolved, but we are still hooked to “Store-and-forward” architecture of email systems which  mimics snail-mail. In spite of the technological advances, we are living in highly segmented world, with information living on islands – emails, blogs, photo, blogs, micro blogs like twitter, web collaboration, net meetings, IM and so on.

In Google Wave you create a wave (can be an email or IM conversation or a document for collaboration or to publish on a blog or just to play a game) and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Google Wave an HTML 5 app, built using Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other desktop functions like drag-and-drop. It has concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. This means Google Wave integrates email, IM and collaborative document creation into a single experience. The most important feature is that you can also use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved. My elder son was very excited to see that. He said “If I am playing chess with my friends using Wave, I will be able to rewind and replay it to see every move. WoHoooooo..”

 

Both of my sons (13 & 14 years) and I spend 80 minutes of quality time together to watch this video and had an hour long discussion over dinner about how Google Wave will shape the future. My elder son was so excited that he wanted to use some of these ideas in the computer game he was coding, before he went to bed.

 

Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves. The Google Wave protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

 Vic Gundotra of Microsoft fame is now leading this effort as VP engineering at Google. Lars and Jens Rasmussen (brothers) who came to Google with acquisition of “2 Tech” in 2004, have been driving this effort at Google for more than 18 months. They also have credible history and star reputation at Google as creators of Google Maps.

The underlying assumption is that a large scale disruptive innovation can dislodge the existing leaders and give an opportunity to other to take leading positions. Hence an attempt to create an online world where people can seamlessly communicate and collaborate across various information exchange scenarios including  email, IM, blog, wiki and multi-lingual (including translation) . With this bold move,  Google is trying to overcome the challenges of integration by hosting the conversation object on the server, allowing multiple channels of interactions and breaking many barriers in the process. The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss recent news. Google has announced this as an open source project and is publishing all the standards at www.waveprotocol.org The ripples of this Google wave have potential of impacting the technology world for decades to come.

 

Some helpful links:

Main Site: http://wave.google.com

API: http://code.google.com/apis/wave

Federation Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org

Web Toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit

How will Swine Flu impact Walmart sales?

Many families have been hit hard by Swine Flu and some families even have multiple members suffering from Swine Flu. Common symptoms are fever, body ache, cough, running nose which are very similar to other flu symptoms and as per medical practitioners, even if you have had flu shot, that does not mean that you cannot have swine flu. People who are suffering from Swine flu continue to indulge in routine activities like traveling in public transportation, attending events, visiting malls etc.  Should you be concerned? Should we all be wearing masks for our safety? So far, it has been deadly in Mexico and not so in America. Is it because

• We haven’t had big enough of number of swine flu patients. So is it just a matter of time?
• Is it that genetically we are more resistant than Mexicans?
• Is it that we have better immune system because of better nutrition & medical systems?
• Or something else (write your comments below)

People are using MASKS as first point of protection, but masks can soon become hard to buy. Many pharmacies do not have them and if they did, they can run out of them right away. I know that they have been handing them out downtown Mexico City and at subway stations, but no such event is reported in USA even after first U.S. swine flu death had been reported in Texas on April 29th.

Another important question is that how will this impact the retail business? During my conversation with mall visitors, they expressed their intent to avoid visiting local malls where Mexicans shop including Wal-Mart as they don’t know if any of the shopper or their friends/family members have recently visited Mexico and got swine flu. That really worries me.

 

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/cdc-/626560.html

Wachovia has issued a report that gives a cursory overview of how the swine flu crisis will effect Mexico as well as international economies, based primarily on the 2003 SARS epidemic model.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/28/swine-flus-potential-econ_n_192292.html

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/front/story/66998.html

European Union’s travel advisory has stated that trips to Mexico should be canceled or delayed, unless it was absolutely “urgent”. Many large corporations in USA are also doing the same.  The Wall Street Journal also reports that, though “the potential impact from the influenza on industry is less than clear, retail and tourism businesses are likely to bear the brunt of the losses.”

Airline stocks may continue to plummet as major travel companies in Europe and Asia cancelled tours to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak. So, how will this impact other general travel plans? Pharmaceutical companies may gain on expectations that demand for anti-viral drugs may surge to deal with any pandemic.

It’s far from clear how bad the outbreak will be, but any blow to travel and trade could eat away further at world GDP (Gross Domestic Product), already forecast by the International Monetary Fund to shrink 1.3 percent this year in the first decline since World War II.