Tech wars have become somehow the norm in recent times from lands far away and even back here in the motherland. Recall how Apple sued Samsung for something I am not interested in talking about now and then Samsung sued back, or is it countersuing? eventually they both ended up paying each other which makes me wonder why didn’t they have to agree, and pay the difference in damages. Maybe it was a grand scheme of money transfer that no one got wind of and somebody was laughing at our stupidity for following the multimillion lawsuit.
Anyway today we look at the inevitable collaboration that might need to exist among the tech giants in order for all of us to enjoy the technology products that we so love to talk about. Consider what will happen if Google decided to sue Microsoft for some reason and then they part ways in terms of doing business. Then that would mean Google chrome is provided with limited resources on windows(Just a thought). This could impact performance of chrome negatively giving it a bad image to end users. While we at it, if anyone has noticed chrome has update its right click box to reflect a more flat look(read windows 8). It’s been a fortnight since I noticed that and I wonder what’s next.
Nokia is one of the phone making giants and oracle owns Java. Nokia phones are known to support the applications build in that platform. So however much both could say that they are not working together, they actually are business partners in this sense.
My friends in the business world might beg to differ because essentially these companies provide different products . However the catch is that even if the products and services provided are different, the end point is more or less the same. The clients that they target are greatly overlapped. The significance of this is that even though the customer will use the products differently, at the end of the day they budget against a fixed amount so the question is always about what will be forgone in order to acquire the other.
Having agreed about that lets take a close look at the motherland. Different tech companies are coming in providing for products and services which have a promise to fuel the transformation of the economy into a middle income one by 2030 in line with the vision. Safaricom for instance running its hugely successful mobile money transfer or M-KOPA providing low energy solutions to rural Kenyans. The government is talking about e-governance; this is something it cannot achieve on its own and not by a long shot. Collaboration means ensuring that it builds its data centers in way third party providers can hook onto the data and provide it to whoever needs in a way that they need it.
Back to the Safaricom M-kopa partnership. First a customer in rural Kenya needs to decide, “am I going to spent the night in the dark because I talked too much on the phone?” Its questions of this kind that will lead to more collaborations between tech companies in order to position themselves strategically in the face of a changing Kenya.
Therefore in the coming days, I believe we will see more partnerships among especially the tech giants or like in the case of Google and YouTube, massive takeover’s if that means these kind of partnerships are of mutual benefit to the involved parties. Additionally I hope that the government formats its data in a way that will make it more accessible not just for scrutiny by observers but also for interested parties to disseminate it in more channels which are easy to use such as the mobile platform.
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