Where is the future battle field for IT companies

Tim O'Reilly provides a wonderful picture of strength and weakness of top players on a list of services in his blog “State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars”. I like the category to classify IT services, however, I think, the battle field for these IT companies should be beyond these listed services.

First of all, most of the listed services focus on individual consumers, while business users like companies have not been cared much. The demand of information from business users is different from individual consumers. Let’s see consumers’ demand, music, books and movies, these products have been produced by other industry and delivered by IT. So, the focus is on format of delivery. While business user’s demand is on customers’ preference, sales forecast and etc. these are knowledge sometimes not provided by other functions and business users expect to get it from IT. IT may have collected raw data to prepare for these knowledge, but the leap from data to information to knowledge is not easy to be achieved. I think, the knowledge to business users should be another important battlefield for IT companies.

Value chain analysis could provide us another perspective about IT industry. For traditional product, value chain includes a vertical chain of sales order, manufacturing and distribution. Now, most of IT company focus on the last part, information distribution. For manufacturing of information, it’s what we’ve covered in last paragraph, a transformation from data to information to knowledge. For sales order of information, (customers show their preference on type or contents of information), social media functions partly to collect customer’s needs. IT companies will develop competitive advantage if they can get these needs quickly, produce it fast and delivery it in time.

In summary, the future battle field for IT companies could be market of not only consumers, but also business users, not only different services to users, but also transformation from data to knowledge and gathering customer needs.