Remove the barrier

In early days of business the focus was to create entry barriers for competitors , especially putting constraints at customer end . Ensuring that the product which customer has bought will provide him service only under one vendor and he will not be able to switch vendors. This way customers have to at times take decision to stick with one service provider and one of the classic example is mobile number portability .
In my 5 years of corporate career I have changed more then 5 places because of work , that means every time I have to change my mobile number or at times I if it was short duration like 2-3 months then I had to take a call to be on roaming and increase my phone bill . With mobile number portability my service provider who gave me first number is not holding my number in case I decide to change to new operator.
People talk about customer centric organisation , here I see a customer centric industry . Thanks to innovation in technology , regulations and of course willing ness of players now entire industry is thinking from customers point of view .
Another similar example will be one of the recent decision to enable customer accessing any DTH operator using same set top box , this will be called conditional access and will be executed by associating a small device with your Set top box.
It is definitely hard decision for service providers to let their customers go to some one else with such an ease but developing a seem less experience for customers will be beneficial for entire industry in terms of common standards and competitive environment . If one will loose customers then similar manner he will gain them from rival providers.
Overall entire industry will be very competitive with all service providers have to match the best offers given by competitors and The differentiation will be significant from each other to retain the customer base.

Future is Virtual

Ever imagine in 21st century someone is walking into a computer shop and asking for a laptop or desktop with 512 MB RAM and probably 1-2 GB of harddisk , you would say he must be living in late 19th century but I would say he is living in mid 21st century thats the future may look like where thin client may again be reduced to dumb client and every thing is taken care by servers over world wide web.
What does a person want from his desktop today , If he is a manager he would like to come to office and check his mails on oulook look into outlook calender for his schedule for the day , work on a presentation for next day and then may be check the excel template for qualiy control. In addition to this he may be using some intranet or internet portals for various other activities but as for as my knowledge goes typical managers who manage resources in an organization are restricted to MS office they don't have to do more then that.
Now with bare minimum memory and harddisk in a system one can definitely open a web browser ( or via Mobile) and connect to net , thats all you need Globally hosted operating system now provides a complete virtual desktop just one click away and all you need to connect to it is a web browser and a good version of flash running on your system ( now that would not need much of computing power !) even ur mobile is able to run a simple web broweser . This G.HO.S.T comes with 5 GB initial storage space and all basic tools and services you would expect an operating system to provide infact as competitive as ur windows desktop , It has it's own office tools , mailing solution , media player and much more .
There is facility given to upload and download files from local disk to G.HO.S.T environment and vice versa. Now isn't it all a manager needs , he will be getting his mailing service , doc, PPT and excel . Then there are hundreds of complimentary services being provided by different websites for example Zoho.com which is an online CRM solution you can maintain customer contacts and automate your entire
salesforce online at a very low cost , Google doc and ebook have already been there for a long time now. If thats not enough then there are portals which can provide a huge database and even mail archival for your corporation . Companies like Sonian provide mail archival solution whereas Amazon web services have started providing database on demand.
At onside there are huge benefits and absolute freedom of any hardware or software because of these services on the other side there is everything on stack , giving away entire database of an organization to a third party vendor is something which is still not thinkable, or even accessing remote desktop will give away your credentials which means threat to privacy but then everything in this world comes at a cost and associated risk the tradeoff ofcourse depends on us