Strategic Technology

Are you curious as to why some technologies and products that embody superior technology fail in the marketplace, so that you can participate in products that have both good technology and are successful? Are you interested in why the industry increasingly revolves around consortia like W3C, OMG, IETF, etc? Are you curious as to why there is a battle being waged between Microsoft and "everybody else", and the government is even getting involved? Would you like a better understanding of the industry structure and operation, so that you can operate more effectively within it? Would you like to develop an understanding of strategies and tactics to cope with standardization, industry consortia and collaboration, and competition? Would you like to collaborate with a cross-disciplinary group of students to address such these issues?

Today the design of successful products in the computing and communications industry has to take into account many non-technical as well as technical factors. In industry and its technologies are affected by many crosscurrents, such as standards, industry consortia, economics factors that are peculiar to these industries, the management of intellectual property, etc. Any successful product must complete in an industry where a number of complementary products have to interoperate to provide value to the customer. Increasingly design effort stresses less core infrastructure and more applications, where an understanding of the user needs and where the application fit with complementary and competitive products is the key to success or failure. Overall these non-technical issues are, along with the technology itself, major considerations in product strategies and success.

This course covers: Industries addressing both applications and infrastructure, software and hardware, for computing, networking, and especially networked computing.